


Burial By Fire

by paperiuni



Series: Season of Cinders [1]
Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Action/Adventure, Canon-Typical Violence, Friends to Lovers, Friendship/Love, Gen, Horror, Illustrations, M/M, Mission Fic, Rescue, Slight AU - Feelings First, Spirits, The Fade, Trust
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-08
Updated: 2016-09-09
Packaged: 2018-08-13 11:47:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 30,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7975717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperiuni/pseuds/paperiuni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Inquisition is on the hunt for the Venatori in the Hissing Wastes, Dorian harbours a secret, and a nefarious plan is a single piece short of coming to fruition.</p><p>When the Inquisitor's party is ambushed and trapped, they can only rely on their wits and each other to escape their predicament and solve a mystery that could let forbidden magic back into the world.</p><p>Alongside all that, Bull and Dorian must face some fateful revelations about themselves--and each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Smoke

**Author's Note:**

  * For [zythepsary](https://archiveofourown.org/users/zythepsary/gifts).



> For Marie, for lending me faith when I needed it, and for being a dear heart.
> 
> Rejected title: "Dorian _no_ "
> 
> This was actually supposed to be my entry for the 2015 DxB minibang. It's a different story now, after more than a year in the fandom, but it's probably a better one for it all.
> 
> The art for this story was done by the wonderful and intrepid Ren ([mens-frights-activist](http://mens-frights-activist.tumblr.com)) and the darling, marvellous Katie ([serenity-fails](http://serenity-fails.tumblr.com)), both of whom were a great delight to work with and an inspiration as I fought to meet the deadline. I salute you.
> 
> Please go see their fantastic art on tumblr [here](http://mens-frights-activist.tumblr.com/post/150166783338), [here](http://serenity-fails.tumblr.com/post/150167500631) and [here](http://serenity-fails.tumblr.com/post/150167502091) and shower them with adoration!
> 
>  **Story Content Notes** : Psychological horror, canon-typical prejudice against Qunari, game spoilers for Sand and Ruin (Hissing Wastes side quest)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Recommended listening: [Deep Forest: _Media Luna_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrrjN2WgwD4)

*

Dorian is leafing through the dead Venatori overseer's correspondence when he's interrupted by a man's croaking breath being slit in the middle. Literally, it turns out, as Bull wipes his knife on the soldier's hood and lets the body splay on the ground. It sends up a puff of sand that the wind sweeps into a southbound plume.

"Should be the last of them." Bull glances up at Cole. The boy crouches on top of one of the wheeled cages that clutter a corner of the makeshift fort they just emptied.

"He was," Cole says. He seems _thin_ , like a stiletto blade, whetted down to a point and a purpose. "Life like a cracked cup, dwindling drop by drop. A mercy, though he showed none."

In good conscience, Dorian cannot blame Cole for the way he draws into himself. The cages, fitted with shackles and chains, are empty. They were late. Whatever unfortunate souls the Venatori held here, those people are gone.

Vanished into the breadth of the Hissing Wastes. The desert spreads out beneath them in crags and hollows, with shrub-dotted rock giving way to rows upon rows of dunes farther to the south.

The Venatori had a humble fortification of stone, bleached ruins shored up by magic or by the hands of slaves. This is the first semi-permanent structure their party have encountered during their two weeks of tracking down the rogue mages.

"Cole," Lavellan calls out from the entrance to the larger of the two buildings. "There seems to be a kitchen out back. See if there's anything there that we can use, if you would?"

Lizard-like, Cole vaults down from his roost and disappears inside.

"Good thinking, keeping the kid busy," Bull says, once he's out of earshot. "We should go through the rest of the place, too. Be a sorry end to this trip if the trail ended here."

"Indeed."

Interior space at the fort seems to have been scarce, given that the Venatori, mages included, were living in tents in the courtyard. While Bull finished the throat-cutting, Dorian has been skimming the papers scattered on the overseer's flimsy desk.

"I may have something here, in fact." He holds up a note dashed on much-cleaned parchment. Next to it are maps and supply lists, similar pithy messages in a few different hands, and a sheaf of notes on thick paper, folded inside the cover of a travelling journal. Those pique Dorian's curiosity, but the note is of more immediate import.

Lavellan takes the piece of parchment from him. She'll be able to feel the same tingle of enchantment that touched Dorian's own fingers. "Is this the same cipher we found at the first camp?"

"Give me a moment with it." There's an obfuscation charm on the note, but nothing that will thwart him. Considering how little resistance the overseer put up in the end, the Venatori must be nearing the shallow end of their pool of magical talent.

"Go give Cole a hand inside, boss." Bull's tone softens it into a suggestion. "I'll take the courtyard." And the dead bodies, scattered by their sneak attack.

In spite of his warm layers warding off the pre-dawn chill, Dorian shivers, then shakes his shoulders to hide it. These were Venatori. Slavers, zealots, traitors. The reason why he came to the south in the first place.

He should be long inured to this.

* * *

"No more drawings of ancient dwarven architecture, at least." Lavellan sets one more sketched map into the _of interest_ pile.

"I thought you delegated that one to Harding's scouts?" Dorian doesn't look up. His hands are cupped to hold the delicate tracery of the counterspell while it runs its course.

"I'm hoping to delegate it to the University of Orlais. Somewhere a chair of archaeology will be dancing a refined jig of joy, but I'd rather root out the Venatori and go home."

"Hold a moment more." The charm snaps, a feeling not unlike a pebble bouncing off the facade of his mind, and the inked words reorder themselves on the parchment. "There we are. Heralds of the divine first."

"Pssh." She takes the note from his hand. "Mythal's stars, don't you start, too."

Cole and Bull rejoin them, the former laden with bundles of food and the latter with his riven cuirass. It stopped a Venatori blade, but that service may be its last until they can get to an armourer.

"Found our next stop yet?" Bull drops the cuirass to the ground. "Provisions won't be a problem."

"Not to undermine your witticisms, Dorian," Lavellan interrupts, sheepish, "but this is in Tevene."

"Ah." He was overly eager for some friendly needling at her expense. Refuge in glibness. "What luck that I happened along."

"If I was the praying type, I'd thank _somebody_ for you daily," Bull says, crouching to inspect his ruined armour, and Dorian does a lightning-quick estimation of how much he means that.

"I am a gift, it is true." Estimation inconclusive, Dorian turns to the note. "It seems our expired friend here has left us another." The overseer's corpse sprawls several feet away, a dagger wound through the back ribs darkening his robes.

"No fear in him, in the end," Cole says. " _They are so very close. Only a little farther now._ Spill the slaves, spare no strain. The pieces will fall."

"Shit," Bull says under his breath. There's little to add to that.

Dorian breaks the silence. "These are orders to withdraw, signed by a Magister Varelia. 'Pull back to the stronghold at once.' She's rather more snippy about it, but that is the gist."

"This was only a rear guard?" Bull's voice settles into dry solidity.

"That's the look of it."

"They're not on home ground here," Bull says, appraising. "No time to get to know every nook and cranny. On the other hand, they probably didn't want any uninvited visitors while they snooped about."

With a noise of vague distaste, Lavellan turns the dead overseer over onto his back. "Here I was, hoping to avoid scrounging through the bodies."

* * *

The map tucked into the overseer's robes has a red-ringed gash in it. To their great fortune, the back of the parchment has soaked up most of the blood, and the drawing on the other side remains legible.

While Lavellan and Cole divide Cole's spoils from the kitchen for all of them to carry, Bull digs through his pack for a few wooden jars. Dorian is making room in his own things for the _of interest_ pile of documents when Bull calls out to him.

"Hey. Can you hold a brush?"

Dorian sets down his bag of spell components and sighs a mostly feigned sigh. "Did I spend two years of my life studying the drawing of ritual symbols where the slightest mistake would ruin the entire summoning, you mean?"

Unlike Lavellan, Bull has yet to fold before Dorian's gibes. "That'll do. Lend me a hand here." He has two ready-mixed bowls of vitaar paint set on a stool, red and black.

"I said 'ritual symbols', not 'Qunari body art'."

"Art's optional," Bull says, with unaccountable merriment. "This is armour. Best I can do right now." He salvaged his pauldrons and bracers, but the boiled-leather cuirass is beyond field repair.

"You want me to--what? Slather paint on you?"

"The front and the back." Bull slaps his chest for emphasis.

"You're sure I won't write something obscene in Tevene all over your back?" Dorian picks up one of Bull's brushes, letting the horsehair bristles flex against his palm.

"If it keeps me alive. Though if the innuendo's any good, you could always share."

By way of retort, Dorian dips the brush and puts a ragged scarlet stroke down Bull's cheek.

Most of the time, Bull seems to restrict the vitaar to his face and neck. Dorian's seen the complex patterns worn by other Tal-Vashoth mercenaries in the Inquisition's employ, the few that there are. Bold shocks of white, dancing slants of yellow and black. He can admit to some enchantment, though he's yet to ask about any meanings.

"Just put on an even coat," Bull instructs as Dorian finishes covering his face. "Don't need frills this time. Nobody here to look at it but some soon-to-be-dead 'Vints."

"There's always me."

"Yeah," Bull says, "but I like you breathing."

It gives Dorian a contrary sense of comfort to see Bull's scar-scoured skin vanish under the vitaar. The dye is blisteringly toxic to humans when runny, so he doesn't rush, wetting the brush and scraping off the excess paint against the rim of the bowl, time and again. He paints wide bands of black, with enough skin left between them to not hamper Bull's mobility.

Though Bull and shirts are not often acquainted, and thus Dorian has a detailed picture of the contours of his back, he might linger a little. Imagine running his own bare hands along them, instead of the brush.

That isn't what they are, though. Bull may be an endless font of casual camaraderie and throat-burning innuendo, and Dorian may rely on their rapport in matters of battle, but that is where it stops.

He'd hardly know how to ask for anything else. It's an idle fancy, best kept as an occasional diversion from the tedium of their journey.

Bull grunts a non-verbal query, and Dorian stirs himself back to the work. As he picks up the red, his hands follow an old pattern unasked: when he's done, the swirling shape of a Vyrantine fire glyph coils on Bull's back. A sigil of cleansing or destruction.

  


[ ](http://i.imgur.com/X3pTVIL.png)

  


It is certainly one way to make a mark on him.

Bull stands, stretches, and nods approval. Dorian wills his smile to stay blithe.

"Will you be ready soon?" Lavellan has availed herself of the fort's well and brought back the filled waterskins. "If the map is right, we could get to the stronghold before noon."

"Any clue as to the opposition?"

"There doesn't seem to be a mention of this Magister Varelia among the correspondence we found at the other camps. In light of what Cole sensed, though..." She gestures at the overseer's body as if it could stand in for the man's last living thoughts.

"We may wish to make haste, yes," Dorian puts in. "She's a new element, very late in the game." That is where his head should be, instead of coasting back towards Bull. He opens his component bag and checks it, mechanically: lyrium vials, salt, chalk, incense. Spare focus stones for his staff. The leather pouch pressed into the deepest corner. He brushes his fingers against it, reassured that it is there, and tugs the bag closed.

"I'm ready," Cole says from behind Lavellan, shouldering his pack. In moments, the rest of them join him, and they're off again.

* * *

Bull did think a wry thought or two about how much of a _stronghold_ the Venatori could've set up in the desert, if the earlier outposts were any suggestion. 

The truth undermines his nonchalance somewhat. If it weren't for Cole, they might've missed the entire entrance. At the bottom of a steep, snaking pass, they find the statue of a dwarven warrior, buried to its chest in the sand. Hidden in the rock face from which the statue is hewn is the maw of a tunnel diving into the dark. Bull has to stoop to fit through.

Not entirely easily he lets Lavellan take the lead. A neatly carved stairway, the edges of the steps worn round, leads them downward. Lavellan holds up a light, a leaf-green spell wisp caught at the end of her staff. Her choice of colour does nothing to make the passageway less eerie. Sweat gathers in Bull's palms, seeping into the soft gloves he wears inside the gauntlets.

"This doesn't seem like a practical way to move in captives." Dorian's voice ricochets into echoes, and he lowers it at once. Bull notes his word choice more than his volume. "Two people could barely go abreast here. Well, unless one of them is already the width of two men."

 _You like it_ , Bull doesn't say. "My guess is it's a back door. It used to come out in the middle of that cliff. You saw all the sand piled around the guard statue."

"There was a thaig in this area once. Maybe this was a settlement," Lavellan says. The light reveals an accumulation of scree upon the steps--they haven't been used recently. A chill settles in around them, sheening the skin.

"I hear something." Cole walks last, so silent that now and then Bull has to twist back to confirm that he's still along. 

"What's that, kid?"

In front of Bull, Lavellan stops, bringing them all to a halt.

"I don't know," Cole says, unsettlingly plain. "It's too far below. I see their mouths move but no sound comes."

"The worst thing is that I don't know if that's a metaphor," Bull grumbles. Part of it is for show, sure, but a layer of agitation stretches beneath. "Think we could just bring down the ceiling and leave the Venatori with whatever's down here?"

"I have two words one usually doesn't have to bring up to you," Dorian says.

" 'Innocent' and 'bystanders'?" It taxes him more than it should to keep his answer level.

"Those fit."

"No." Cole's single word punches into their exchange. "They are torn to threads, spun to shreds. Purpose becomes only pain. We have to help."

Lavellan breathes out. Her sigh moves in whispers along the walls."I don't want to be alarmist, but this has the reek of blood magic all over it."

"Nothing alarmist about the truth, boss."

"If we get closer, I can tell more," Cole says. His voice has a strained undertone, like he were leaning forward over a precipice.

"Well." Dorian's staff thumps on a step. "My love of spectacle aside, a spot of targeted violence might serve us better than an indiscriminate cave-in."

"You can drop that now, 'Vint," Bull mutters, his eye turned downwards. The spell wisp only reveals a slope of ceiling, cutting down through the rock.

They descend.

* * *

Lavellan says, "There's an intersection." The sound of her voice seems unreal after the silence. Their progress is now lit by purple instead of emerald green, as Dorian took over the task of providing illumination; in Bull's opinion, not a great improvement.

He has no problem with tight spaces, or even the idea of the crushing bulk of bedrock around them. The air parches his throat, and he rubs away fine grit from his eye now and then. His knee sends the occasional warning twinge over the unending stairs. The thing gnawing at his calm is subtler than that: a recurring strand of something that isn't the movement of air through the tunnel.

One moment, he tastes honey, sweet and tangy as the wet Fereldan summer. Then it becomes the aroma of turned soil, and the stone steps seem to yield like the earth of a field under his feet.

Then, again, only the sand smell of the passage, and some trace of cloves from Dorian's hair. Cloves don't suit him, but might've been picked under the hardship of limited options.

Ahead, the stairs wind down to a threshold that opens into a wider corridor. Angular patterns adorn the floor, cracked in places by the shiftings of the earth, and the ceiling leaps to twice the height it is in the stairway.

Bull would give a fistful of royals to have a dwarf with them, one of those who retain their knack for underground navigation. He stretches his arms wide. "About time for some breathing room."

"Left or right?" Dorian tilts the spell wisp at a row of reliefs along the wall. "Something is written here, but it's the same script as in the tomb sketches we found. Some immemorial form of Dwarvish, I expect."

"Cole?" Lavellan prompts. Bull knows each of the others is more magically attuned than he is, but no one's mentioned anything weird. Like their senses playing tricks on them.

Maybe the cramped stairway was getting to him. He's happy to wring Venatori necks any day of the week, especially if it comes with a chance to rescue a few people from their abuses. He gave Lavellan his loyalty and has yet to regret it, constant danger, frequent demons, and the mess with the Qun on the Storm Coast all taken into account.

Slouch-shouldered, Cole turns his head from side to side. "Left."

The floor seems to keep sloping down under their feet. Bull wishes he felt more secure about the perception.

* * *

They've entered a settlement or a complex: despite the crumbled stretches of wall, the rubble blocking doorways, and the chalky stains where water has seeped through the rock, the ancient dwarven construction has yet to surrender to time.

Dorian gets out a piece of vellum and starts scratching out a rough map of the corridors. They eat and drink as they walk, shallow draughts from skins, mouthfuls of jerky and sun-dried fruit to stave off sneaking weariness. Spared such mundane needs, Cole stalks ahead to secure their way.

While people may have lived here once, silence and darkness have long since reclaimed the halls. At every junction, Bull inspects the dust-riddled floor, hoping for some track of recent passage.

"Still nothing?" Lavellan asks, from where she and Dorian wait back beyond the crossing of two more corridors. If Dorian's cartography is to be believed, the complex is laid out as a series of concentric rectangles, but the corridors that join them aren't so orderly.

"Probably." Bull sweeps his light around one more time: Lavellan affixed her spell wisp to the back of his gauntlet. It's a little creepy, but it does make the detail hunt easier. "Maybe we should wait for the kid to get back."

"You did tell him not to stray too far, right?" Dorian adjusts the clasp cinching his desert scarf in place. "He is a smart lad, but his priorities are peculiar at times."

"Cole wouldn't leave us." The Inquisitor doesn't snap; it's rather a serrated edge of exhaustion creeping into her tone.

"I know," Dorian says, hushed. "I only mean that things pull at him differently. Not always in ways he can help."

They both sound like they could use a break. Bull might not mind a short reprieve, himself. He begins to say as much, the wisp shimmering as he stands, when the light glances off something bright and metallic in the corridor behind Lavellan and Dorian.

Cole would let them hear him before he got that close.

"Boss, behind you!"

A warning is a good instinct. This time, it startles Lavellan into whirling on her heel--and with the break in her focus, the spell wisp is doused like a nipped candle.

Muffled footfalls patter up towards them. Groping for his axe, Bull sidles towards where he thinks there was a clear expanse of wall to put at his back. Conjuring a light takes a blink, so he only has to wait for one of the others--

Dorian yells, but instead of a violet glow, Bull senses the buffet of a force spell and the crunch of a body smacked violently against a wall. Someone curses in much deeper Tevene than Dorian's voice will go, while Lavellan gasps out half of an Elvish incantation before she's cut off by a thudding impact.

The air shifts to Bull's left. Unhesitating, letting his ears do the work his eye can't, he drops his hand low and to the side. The chill line of the wall is barely an arm's length behind him, which limits the angle of attack.

He grabs leather and cloth, pivots on his right leg and slams his would-be attacker into the wall with all his strength. Bone breaks, wet and crackling.

"Dorian, _light_!" he shouts, hoping that his voice will be a focal point among the chaos, as he lets his opponent slump from his grip.

Light swirls into being in the middle of the junction: a blue phantom flame struck at the end of a simple, boldly curved staff. Through the pulsing afterimages, Bull sees Lavellan, dangling boneless from the arm of a tall Venatori soldier, and Dorian, on his knees and blood trickling from his mouth. A woman in dark leathers holds a sword to his throat. To his right sprawls the prone form of another prowler in the same muted garb.

"Disarm the oxman." Bull doesn't need much Tevene to decipher the command from the mage. A fourth person, the recipient of the order, steps up from behind him. He could seize the man, haul him in to use as a shield...

"To your knees, creature. You move an inch, and I put an icicle through her throat," the mage says in accented Common. "Our lord does not require the Inquisitor alive. It's only a preference." She's a tall, lanky woman, proud shoulders tapering to narrow hips.

Dorian's glower is black and festering, made more dramatic by his bloodied mouth, but Lavellan is what stays Bull's hand as the fourth soldier unhasps the strap of his axe and takes his dirks. He has three more knives tucked away; only the one in his bracer is within fluid reach.

A rag smeared with a dark liquid has been tossed to the floor. The stain scintillates even in the blue light. _Magebane_ , Bull understands. Lyrium dust and felandaris, mixed to nullify a spellcaster's threat.

 _Wait_ , he tries to impose upon Dorian, seeking his eye as best he can in full sight of their captors. _We're not dead yet, so they want something more than our lives. Wait._

"Delightful," Dorian says in a tone that should spread frost from his tongue. So much for prudence. Pointedly, he speaks Common. "Do tell me, dear compatriots, was the trail of correspondence truly necessary? The entire mole-and-fennec chase across the desert? Only so you could make a theatrical entrance."

The mage scoffs--an art the 'Vints have perfected--and keeps to Tevene. "You've made some mighty friends, Lord Pavus. Fortunately those friends won't easily drop a Venatori's trail once they get the scent."

 _Well, crap._ Bull supposes he has to shoulder part of that blame. Two weeks of cross-country trekking seemed a reasonable price for stopping the Venatori; it also brought them several days' travel beyond the camps that tether them back to the bulwark of the Inquisition.

There's a knife point to the flesh of his back. The vitaar may not stop a well-aimed thrust, tip-first into a kidney--and the mage keeps him in her sights.

"You wasted two dozen lives on this mummery." Genuine fury smoulders under Dorian's consternation. "More, I must suspect, since that's only the number we killed."

"Credible resistance," the mage says. "Their sacrifice brought you to us. So, to the point. The Inquisitor will be taken to Lord Corypheus, and your horned beast may prove amusing before his end, but it is you who interest me."

"Of course." Dorian's throat moves barely visibly. Courtly composure, finding a vastly different application. "What may I do for you, then, madam?"

Her mouth twitches with arid amusement. "You may give me the amulet Gereon Alexius used, and your knowledge of his time spells besides, and perhaps I will spare your life."

* * *


	2. Kindling

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Recommended listening: [Hans Zimmer: _Spectres in the Fog_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcAfeslEvWg)

Dorian feels the first rapid-fire lie shrivel in his mouth. _I don't know what you mean._ Horror forces its choking tendrils through his anger.

He took his time arriving to that conclusion, but the one good outcome of his old mentor's execution--by the Inquisitor's hand--was that his research died with him. Actual, functional time magic at the hands of the liberated mages, or most _anyone_ in Tevinter? Perish the thought. So Dorian has told himself time and again, even as he keeps the one, exceedingly dangerous, memento that he has of Gereon close at hand.

Not in sight, though. There are those among his current companions that would not understand.

Lavellan would surely protest, if the magebane hadn't dropped her like a stone. A few steps to Dorian's left, past the tall soldier holding the Inquisitor, Bull's face is set in watchful stoicism. 

"I've found something to trip your famed wits, I see." The Venatori woman--he'd place her accent somewhere to the west, maybe Asariel--seems rather dispassionate about her discovery, too. "I know you have it. How much of you my soldiers will search before they find it--that is up to you."

_Pull yourself together. Stop looking at Bull, for that matter. Don't let them think he's important._

Venatori come in a number of stripes, but Dorian is willing to bet on one thing. While he and Lavellan count as some manner of useful to them, Bull doesn't even count as a person. Dorian knows his coiled, alert stillness; Dorian would only need to buy him an opening.

What would that opening cost?

"If you wanted only to debate theory, a polite letter would've sufficed." He makes his lips crook airily. "You are aware that Alexius cast me out long before he cracked the practice. So my memory may be a touch dimmed by time and whiskey, but--"

"Stop your blithering. We have eyes and ears within the walls of your fortress. You killed our brothers and sisters at Redcliffe, but we uncovered the truth all the same."

"Andraste's aesthetically pleasing arse, would you stop sermonising? I've heard all the claptrap about your glorious schemes." The stone is cold under his knees, the steel colder against his neck. Another soldier with a knife stands behind Bull. Bull could take a knife stab, it'd probably only get him going properly, but Dorian flinches to think of the aftermath. His ferocious stamina in a fight demands its due.

"Yet you take me for a fool," the woman says. "I know you worked time magic at Redcliffe, Pavus. I can sense the amulet on you."

 _Cole_ , Dorian reminds himself. _He can vanish right under their eyes. They can't catch him._

If he hasn't been thwarted into following some other trail. Beyond the dread throbbing in his chest, Dorian feels the Fade press against him like a blanket of humid mist, sweltering in its nearness. The Veil tatters in these tunnels, though he can't quite divine the root cause of it.

One more reason to tread lightly.

_They also can't kill me. Not yet._

"Very well," he says, and the rancour comes too easy. Buying time was not, in truth, the only reason he was stalling. "In my pack. There's a bag of ritual components."

He stares at the woman because it gives him an excuse to avert his face from Bull's. The big soldier lets Lavellan slump against a wall and wrests away the straps of Dorian's pack none too gently. He'd slam a handful of flame into the man for the jostling, if there weren't the promise of thorough retaliation on their leader's face.

It'd get Bull his opening--and a blade in the back.

"Take them away." She cocks her head with the first twinge of impatience he's seen her show. "Lord Pavus and I will reconvene later, for the rest of this discussion."

* * *

Bull will give the Venatori this much: they understand the concept of isolating their captives. Their dungeon is a set of small storerooms rather than proper cells, but the doors are solid stone and nearly as thick as Bull's hand is wide. His last glimpse is one of the soldiers carrying Lavellan into another room, and then the door slots into its jamb and he's left in darkness.

The Venatori took the precaution of binding his hands. The ropes occupy him for a while. They also took his knives and what pieces of his armour they could remove; he feels the vitaar crackle as he works his fingers free through the rough hemp of his bonds.

The coat of dye won't flake, though. It's a ridiculous effort to find the ingredients this far south, but he knows he mixed the vitaar right. Damn 'Vints knew it, too. The guy behind him kept prodding him to move with his knife-tip, not a hand. Skin contact with the dry paint wouldn't have given him much more than a rash, but it'd have been some small satisfaction.

Once free, Bull paces the dimensions of the room. Three and two strides a side, and his horns nearly scour the ceiling. The door is tight and the hinges are on the outside. Dwarves are the best builders in the world, though Bull could picture a nicer reminder of that fact than the door not budging a twitch under his shoulder.

"Fuck," he tells the stale air at length.

Shutting a person in the dark will undo them. How fast and how bad, that's where the lines shift, but the fact remains. The Ben-Hassrath use confinement as a tool of interrogation and re-education both, so Bull's been here.

_Stay centered. Bide your time._

Bull has enough Tevene of the Low variety that he got the gist of the mage leader's words. The High and Low languages are closer together than the alti like to pretend. The way she acted, she might even have assumed he understood nothing. That'd be pretty par for the course.

He believes what she said, though. She'll have no scruples about killing him, fast or slow. He can quite likely withstand more pain than she expects. They might leave him here, to starvation or madness, but there was already the hint of using him to coerce Dorian.

The circular shape Dorian painted on him tugs at his skin as he stretches. Best to try and stay warm. Going through his own body gives him something to do.

Something besides thinking of the damnable amulet, shimmering green in the Venatori's cupped hand. The blue light from her staff didn't even seem to tint it. It was the colour of an open rift, as it'd been when Bull saw Alexius hold it at Redcliffe.

Dorian stared at it without pretence, his face inexpressible. Bull's observed his moods for a while, but this one fell outside the scale he knows.

Bull brought nothing with him out of Seheron or Par Vollen. He was given the tools he'd need for his tasks, but Qunari have no keepsakes, no idle objects to anchor memories. The closest they may come is the antaam and their weapons, which are at the core of their work. The way Dorian looked at the amulet was--

How near together can hatred and longing sit in someone's heart?

Another part of Bull considers the practical ramifications: he'd had no idea Dorian had the amulet. He should have. It was an item of note to the Ben-Hassrath, when Bull still wrote reports. Now the enemy holds it, and them all with it.

The bottom line is this: he must get the Inquisitor out of here alive. If he doesn't make it, the trade is fair. One bright, battered life for the life of the world. Not everyone in their company understands this, but Bull always has.

That thought is his centre. He bides his time.

* * *

Dorian is worrying at the iron shackle on his wrist when the door to his cell opens. Torchlight floods the bare room, making him squint after the absolute darkness. It's been some hours: he needs to relieve himself, but not unbearably yet. Thirst, scratching at his throat, is the greater concern.

"The magister wants you, so move it." The guard holding the torch is short, squat and sour. He likes the bored curl of her face better than the barely leashed fanaticism in her mistress's visage.

He gets to his feet, hampered by both the manacle and the rope below it. They chained him twofold: while the rope binds his hands in front of him, the shackle traps him more thoroughly. Its dull black surface is marred with painted sigils. It isn't a true enchantment, but a conjuration to trammel his magic. He senses the lingering whiff of Varelia's handiwork: when examined up close, enchantment often betrays its creator and their idiosyncrasies.

"Any chance that I might refresh myself a tad bit?" He makes a show of smelling his sleeve. In Tevinter, he had a reputation as a fop and a hedonist. He may have ruined that with his initial furious outburst at Varelia, but he thinks it better to give an image of tractability. The Venatori are given to underestimating their enemies.

"That's a laugh." The guard sighs. "We're on water rations. You think Herself is going to waste any on you when you're going to be vulture food this time tomorrow?"

"I pride myself on optimism," Dorian says, "and proper presentation." She makes him walk in front, and he does, without complaint. A row of identical narrow doors, close together. Storage rooms? A turn to the right, at her prodding. He tries to count the corridors.

He can't join in the guard's estimation of his remaining lifespan. Varelia has done her research. She knows whatever leverage she has on Dorian hinges on the Inquisitor's life. And Bull's, Dorian adds, though his captors might not be relying on that.

The thought is a twin-edged blade. Bull has no worth to them. His worth to _Dorian_ is the subject of a sweet-sharp riddle.

Dorian counts the turns. The tightly laid stonework echoes with their footfalls. They descend a staircase--forty steps--and every step seems to take them deeper into an invisible mire. Silky presences thread themselves around Dorian's calves like waving fronds of seaweed. Icy pinpricks race up and down his spine, and he feels his gut tighten with a feeling that teeters between lust and fear: that unwelcome awareness that his walls are being tested.

The air swims with spirits, even through the barrier of the magic block. _How does Varelia think down here? How does she cast?_ Does he want to ask that?

The guard trudges on behind him, oblivious to the simmering otherworldly activity all around them.

Finally she stops in an antechamber, where the vestiges of ancient carvings enliven the blue-gray stone of the walls. Her torch barely lets Dorian see the stocky, stylised shapes of dwarven figures.

She knocks on a door, opens it, and the oddly cheery light of a yellow glowstone leads them into a study. It looks haphazardly set up. A side table loaded with scattered papers leans against a chest stuffed with scrolls, and the glowstone lantern has been hung from an old torch sconce. Under its light sits a desk with two chairs on opposite sides. The desk is stone, spiderweb cracks marring its glossy surface.

Varelia stands from one of the chairs. The quill in her hand drips onto the table. "Write."

Dorian narrows his eyes at her. "A broad instruction, madam."

"Believe me," she says, "I'd rather decipher notes. All that was left in Redcliffe were mawkish ramblings of Gereon Alexius's regrets. Nary a scrap of useful information."

 _Good._ "Remorse over ever casting his lot in with you, I imagine? Alexius was always a tad overwrought in his sentiments."

Such as taking a disaster and a disgrace of a young mage into his household and giving him direction again. That was very like him.

"This brings me no joy, Pavus." Varelia kicks at a chair, and Dorian sits. At a gesture from her, the rope drops from around his wrists. Another magical tool? With his senses blunted, Dorian could not tell.

There are two guards: the one that brought him, and a tall, solemn fellow by the door. They look uncomfortably fit for their job. Even if Dorian fancied his chances against an Imperial magister, her two brutes would tip the odds.

So he says, "You're going to a great deal of trouble for misery, then."

"I _care_ about what you learned together." She rounds on her heel so that her layered robe swirls. "Magister Alexius lost his interest, and your fool of a leader lopped off his head before we could get him."

 _Get him_? Dorian nearly bites his tongue in his haste not to ask. Had the Venatori not dropped Alexius like so much dead weight when the Inquisition and Ferelden's royal guard liberated Redcliffe?

"And now you are ever so generously offering to preserve my learning, I take it," he says. "Out of the goodness of your heart."

She regards him. Her mouth opens from its moue of distaste. "You kept the amulet when you could have destroyed it. You don't truly believe this magic should be forgotten."

Oh, help him. He holds his expression like a glass bowl shattered between his hands. "Some prices are too high, Magister."

Dipping the quill in the inkwell, she slots it ungently into his hand. "That nobility is what will make you write. Because if you don't, I will have my soldiers bring your companions to you. Maybe they'll start with the Qunari creature. It's already missing some of its parts, so a few more will surely not matter."

The correct answer would be _I don't care_. It will not form in Dorian's mouth. Not even when the lie might buy him time.

Staring at the empty sheet with parched eyes, he writes the first word.

* * *

Somewhere far above, the sun must have set. Dorian needs to piss; still, he drinks the cup of tepid water that Varelia's guard plonks on the table.

She is engrossed in the messy heap of notes and drawings that fill the side table. One guard remains inside the door, sighing infrequently in silent boredom. Unspooling the years of lively debate and fervid research in his head seems a near insurmountable task to Dorian; equally daunting as thinking up a way out of this predicament.

He doesn't have his magic. The corners of the room are dense with the Fade and he couldn't even float the quill into the air.

Mail clinks at the door. Varelia turns like an unhooded peregrine, her eyes snapping to the soldier that enters. It's the second guard, the one that was in the room when Dorian was brought in. "What is it?"

No more is needed for her displeasure to show, beacon-like. The soldier, to his credit, does not cower. "A message, Magister."

"A pressing matter, I trust?" Dorian cocks an eyebrow. "Please don't let me keep you."

" _Write_ ," she says. "Enough progress and maybe I'll let you choose whose digits I will have brought to you first. Unless you'd prefer more intimate organs."

Factually he's weathered worse jabs at Inquisition soirées, and yet he has to tense his throat against an imprudent retort. She resolves that impulse for him by going to the door.

The sound of her boot heels is muffled by the floor. The desert has dragged its dusty fingers along the hem of her robes. They may be of fine Neromenian wool, but the Hissing Wastes have worn on her as on any other intruder.

Dorian makes a face at her back, then begins writing the bawdiest tavern song he can remember down the sheet of parchment. A third of the lyrics come out wrong; what matters is that he appears to be continuing.

Looking past the lamp, he tries to catch some snippet of the conversation in the doorway. The guard near whispers. Varelia's jaw tightens with every word.

The news is not good. That may either serve Dorian's interests or make his situation even worse.

"Take him back." She shoves the guard towards Dorian--the first time he's seen her touch any of her retinue. Alti usually don't.

_Agitation. Not intimidation. She's losing her temper._

_Wait for your moment._

The guard--Dorian has an impression of a broad-set, tense face and narrowed eyes--loops the rope back around his wrists while shoving him into the corridor. Varelia's binding is still around his wrist. He goes without resistance, setting his eyes on the corridor and all his focus on his watcher, who ties his hands without heeding the slight angle to his left wrist.

Once the knot is in place, Dorian has a precious nail's width of manoeuvring room.

"She is a rather stormy woman under that serene exterior, no?"

"Stop talking, you blackguard," the man hisses. He speaks Low Tevene, but Dorian hears how his vowels clip precisely. Disgraced aristocracy perhaps?

"You people keep telling me how I have hours to live, yet the fact remains that it may take me days to comb through everything your tempestuous lady considers important." Dorian lets loose every ounce of loquaciousness in him. It's easy; it covers his thinking.

They take a turn that Dorian gauges is wrong. The guard has a hooded lantern that casts a diffuse beam forward. The air around them feels cooler, as if it were welling from deeper underground.

 _Open space to our right._ The light paints out the upper edge of a staircase. _We aren't going back to the cells._

"Sooner or later she'll simply take what she needs," the guard says, low and unpleasant. If his fellow sounded bored of her duty, this one has a veneer of casual malice. "Crack you open like an egg and scoop out the knowledge."

"Maker forbid." Dorian tries to give an aural impression of rolling his eyes. They don't take the stairs, but walk past them along a gallery. Below, the Fade swashes against his mind like a gathering flood. "I imagine your education lacked such lessons, but blood magic is..." He makes himself float over the pause. "More like a hammer than a needle. She'd be more likely to scramble my mind while hunting for the right parts."

_Something is happening. Something they didn't want me to see._

"What do you know, you and your house of high-minded hypocrites? You're afraid of the climb, so you pretend at some nobility of spirit to cover your weakness."

"Oh," Dorian says. "Have I given offence?" Highborn accent. Guard uniform. A noble son who failed to manifest magical talent?

His temples throb with a susurrus of inhuman voices, insubstantial as surf, irrevocable as the tide. He squeezes his fingers together as narrow as they fit, and slips a bent finger under the rope.

"Your very being is an insult," the guard says. "Joining that pretender elf and her doomed march against us."

" 'Us'?" Dorian tarries so his bound hands don't show in the lantern beam. Another finger twists under the loops. "While we're being candid, tell me one thing. What do you think your place will be in this new world your exalted superiors have planned?"

Throwing up every mental wall he has against the ephemeral noises, he listens to the guard's breath hitch.

"None of your business, traitor."

"I do wonder." Dorian works his left hand through the rope, heedless of the bristled hemp. "A nameless pariah, fallen from greatness? Will he merit more than an ignoble end as spell fodder--"

The guard's hand slams around the back of his neck, the light swinging across the ceiling. Dorian drops his weight at once so that the motion pulls him out of the grip. He accepts the jolt to his knees as they hit the floor, and wrests his fingers free.

If he had his magic, the scuffle would be done in the next heartbeat. The guard draws a dagger, looming above Dorian, his face contorted in rage. Dorian may be hardened by travel and battle, but he has the disadvantage in both training and position.

 _With bigger guys, going at them hard is a mistake._ The memory of a morning in the Skyhold training ground pierces his racing thoughts. Bull and Cassandra on the sand, Lavellan watching avidly next to Dorian himself. _But they're used to winning with power. You turn that on them, and--_

Dorian rolls to the left as the guard grabs at him. _He can't kill me._ On the other hand, a man with a blade and a grudge can cause a great deal of non-lethal pain.

Kicking out a half-blind foot, Dorian strikes a shin and elicits a hiss from the guard. That buys him time to regain his feet, and now the greatest obstacle is the dagger, which glimmers as his opponent cuts at him. Dorian snakes his hand into the path of the blow, plants his feet and grasps the wrist of the guard's weapon hand. An upwards shove reverses his momentum and sends the man staggering.

Dorian grabs at the dagger.

The guard pivots quicker than Dorian calculated possible, and before he can duck, the man rams the heel of his gauntleted hand into his jaw. White spears through his vision, a sudden hard jolt. He still rakes for steady footings as steel digs into the side of his stomach.

Stifling a cry with his teeth in his lip, Dorian scrambles back. Improbably, the lantern remains burning, but its narrow beam turns them both into masses of shadow and movement.

"Give up," the man snarls.

"Oh, shall I?" Dorian summons bravery. "You've threatened to kill me so many times. But you know--" The rope dangles from his right wrist. He grabs a length of it between his hands. However deep the slash is, it seems to have missed his lung. He dearly hopes.

"I think," he says, "that you have nothing more to threaten me with. I think my friends are gone from your villainous clutches."

With that, he darts at the guard. His feint, going for the open face of the guard's helmet, earns him a bloody gash along the forearm, but it puts his hand where he needs it. He throws the rope around the guard's head, hears it chafe against his mail coif, and knees the man in the gut as viciously as he can.

The guard doubles over with a rather satisfying grunt. Dorian uses his own weight to drag him deeper forward, shortening the rope between his gripping fists until the mail scratches his knuckles.

It takes, he observes while the Fade roars in his ears, an inconveniently long time to choke a person to death.

* * *

When the storeroom door opens, Bull's first instinct is to shut his eye. A brisk lunge at the guard would sound better on the page of an adventuring serial, but even torchlight can be blinding after utter darkness.

At first dazzled glimpse, the guard has a weirdly broad rim to his helmet. "The Iron Bull," he says. "Come. She's dazed, but not down. We have a little time now."

"Shit, kid." Keeping his hand on the wall, Bull stumbles out into the corridor. A heap of mail and cloak lies a few steps to his left in a sticky pool: the guard on duty. Cole has claimed a lantern and a ring of keys from the dead man, and is trying the keys on the manacles that trap Lavellan's wrists behind her back.

On an instinct sunk too deep to be undone, Bull takes the guard's sword and dagger, then his waterskin and flint and steel. The rest of his equipment is either blood-soaked or of little use to them.

Lavellan lets up a cough, followed by a spitting noise. "Oh. Oh, that is vile. What in the world--"

"Magebane," Bull says. He tilts her chin with a finger to make sure that her eyes focus properly. "The 'Vints gave you a faceful. First time?"

"I can't say I've had the pleasure." Cole finds the right key, and Lavellan shivers visibly as the shackles come free. "Oh, Creators. I think I--"

Half-swooning forward, she vomits messily on the threshold of an open storeroom. Bull holds her up by the shoulders until the last dry heaves subside.

"The poison, then the pinion. She was cut from the Fade twice over," Cole says. "It hurt her."

The manacles are probably some kind of magic blocker, like the masks of the saarebas. Bull can go with that for now. He wets a weapon-cleaning rag the Venatori kindly left in his belt pouch and gives it to Lavellan to wipe her mouth with. "Anything else you can tell us?" He points this at Cole. "Like where Dorian is?"

He has a fuzzy picture at best about the passage of time. He's thirsty as blazes, but he quaffs stintingly from the waterskin.

"They took him in past the protections. I can't feel him." Cole stands. His long, curved daggers are sheathed on his back; he's unburdened by other tools.

"All right." Lavellan accepts the guard's dagger from Bull, looping it onto her belt. Bull keeps the sword for himself. It's too light, half a toy in his hand, but it'll slice through 'Vints if need be. "Do you know the way out?"

"I followed the soldiers, but they don't go up." Picking up the lantern, Cole shines it down the corridor so they can see the juncture where it joins a wider passage. "Nor do they go down. They stay here, between the sand and the screams."

Bull tries to sift out the most important nuggets of information. "That where they took Dorian? Downstairs?"

Cole nods.

For now, the Venatori remain ignorant of their freedom, but that won't last long. Their equipment is gone, along with their food and water. If they mean to make a break for the surface, their chances will dwindle with each passing hour.

"What do they want?" Lavellan asks. However wan she looks, she's collecting herself. "They haven't killed us yet."

With a pang, Bull recalls he was the only witness to the revelation that Dorian had kept Alexius's amulet.

"Let's find a safer spot." He helps her onto her feet. "I'll give you the short version."

* * *


	3. Spark

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Recommended listening: [A. R. Rahman: _Desert Storm_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-PEo2291U8)

Dorian tightens the knot on the dressing he fashioned from strips of his headscarf, stands, and immediately wobbles against the bulky banister of the gallery. Chill air from the depth licks against his sweating face.

"Fuck," he whispers to himself. The guard didn't have much: a quarter-full waterskin, a few strips of unidentifiable jerky tucked into a pouch, and the belt knife Dorian used in his crude medical efforts.

His stomach continues bleeding. He can feel it warm against the snug bandage. If it didn't signify a spiral towards an inevitable loss of consciousness, he'd be nearly grateful for the pain of the wound. It grounds him against the whispers that sweeten and thicken the air.

He scrounges up the lantern--the dagger fell from the guard's hand, and Dorian couldn't find it--and erects himself with more care.

Wherever he was being taken, he'll be expected. He should be able to trace his way back to the holding cells, but there might be a number of angry Venatori between him and there. Especially if they're also hunting two other escapees.

Three, he reminds himself. Three.

_They are torn to threads, spun to shreds. Purpose becomes only pain. We have to help._

"What did you hear?" Dorian asks, as if Cole could pick up his question like he picks up every hurt that Dorian tries to conceal. "Who's down here?"

Well. He can't help the others if he bleeds out on the floor. The enchanted manacle on his wrist raps against the banister. If he could destroy the sigils, the spell should break...

An echo of sound rings along the ceiling. Dorian freezes. From ahead, rapid footfalls are closing in, though he can't see any light.

The Venatori ambushed them in a pitch-black corridor. He should not take the absence of lanterns as guarantee of anything. At a misty glance, the gallery continues in two directions, and then there are the stairs.

Dorian forcibly mutes his groan of effort, drops the lantern panel so it gives off the merest sliver of illumination, and starts down the steps.

* * *

Lavellan sits quiet for a long moment after Bull has finished. She takes the waterskin, drinks, and looks up at Bull with a cryptic, petrified expression. "Did you know he had the amulet?"

He shakes his head, caught in the uncommon situation that his skill at misdirection undermines the sincerity he wants to show. "I swear, I didn't. It's not like he confides in me."

"Apparently he doesn't confide in anyone." Dorian and the Inquisitor have struck up a delicate friendship of sorts. One wraps himself in nonchalance, the other in cautious courtesy, but Bull knows they spend a lot of time together up in the library. Upset lurks in her voice.

Bull puts away the thought of Dorian and confidences. They can have each other's backs in battle, drink from the same jug of ale and trade doubts of mutual honesty over cards. It's the kind of wartime companionship Bull knows to value.

Sometimes, he's tempted to reach beyond that simple kinship. So far the how of it has been a clawed conundrum, and Bull would rather not barrel into it with his usual panache. It's not a subject for right now, when they barely even know where Dorian is.

 _I'm sorry_ , he wants to say, but he just lays a hand on Lavellan's shoulder. She clasps her hand over his fingers for a moment.

"Cole," she calls out.

The boy slinks back to them from the mouth of the collapsed corridor where they hid. "It's hard to hear them."

"The guards?" Bull asks. It's a rare day that Cole doesn't unnerve him at least a pinch, but he'll admit to the tactical advantages of hearing your enemies thinking. Even if it is only the sad stuff, however that works.

"Oh," Cole says. "Yes. They know now. Angry, alight, agitated. If we can become small, we can slip past."

"I hope that's a figure of speech." The complex is probably nice and spacious by dwarven standards. Bull keeps slamming his horns into doorjambs and his shoulders into torch sconces. "Boss." Turning to Lavellan, he squares his shoulders. "What are we gonna do?"

Dorian remains in the hands of the Venatori. They have a closing window of escape now.

He watches her face firm into steely lines. "We'll come back for him. Given what they wanted from him, they need him alive."

She is every inch the Inquisitor, even in her disarmed, haggard state. She measured the personal against the strategic and this is where she landed.

"Yeah," Bull says, because he gave her his word, because she is _right_.

"We'll come back." Lavellan holds his gaze, and remorse cinches her brows before she forces it down. "And we'll bury every Venatori in this place so deep they won't be found for another thousand years."

* * *

Lowering the lantern, Dorian frowns at the smudged, bloody crescent his heel trod into the layer of sand on the floor. The side of his robes below the wound is wet, dripping now and then.

How much has he bled? He scrubs his boot heel dry with a handful of sand. Urgency keeps him moving, whets his awareness to a knife's edge and fortifies him against the pain. That will not persist.

The good news is that he doesn't think the search party in the gallery followed him down the stairs. Whether they _know_ he descended is another matter. He left evidence of his injury; the dead guard had no open wounds.

He gulps down some water, shaking the skin to hear the forlorn slosh of the remaining amount. Drink to counter blood loss. Following the wall of the side passage, he inches forward another twenty paces, deeper into the gloom.

He's leaving a trail. The Venatori can't wait _too_ long if they mean to recover him alive. What he must do is make the most of his lucid, useful time.

For that, he needs his magic. The manacle won't come off unless he willingly dislocates fingers. Once he's listened to the physical space around him so long that he knows he only has the warbling whispers of the Fade for company, he grabs a sharp-edged rock from the floor and begins scouring the paint from the shackle.

It is tedious toil, one scrape at a time. Silence is impossible, so he contents himself with making as few sounds as possible. At least he can tell which sigil does what: blocking, binding, supporting, completing. He works his way back through the enchantment. Fracturing it uncontrollably might result in arcane backlash, and he's scuffed up enough as it is.

"Come now," he mutters, steadying his sore fingers on the rock. "Ah, Magister. A shortcut? How careless of you." There, if he erases the binding at the top of the row, the rest should fall...

_Little mortal._

He feels the enchantment yield, like snapping a rope under strain.

The ephemeral noises in the back of his mind become one voice. It hums like a tree in a breeze, if each trembling leaf were a note within it. It is whisper-soft and yet it smothers the wave of awareness that swells through him from top to toe.

He can touch the Fade again, and it clusters to him in a thousand questing tendrils.

_Little mortal, hear me._

In the next instant: alarm, icy and drenching. Even as he opens himself to his magic, he fumbles to fling up his mental shields. _I am here. I am aware. This is me, myself, whole and entire. I will not hear you._

Something is here with him, something more than the gauzy wraiths that are little more than dregs of dream, raw Fade stuff given sketched form.

Dorian's first attempt to regain his feet ends with fresh bruises on his already abused knees. Swearing, he props himself up on the wall. When the bandage shifts, he feels it tear from the blood that's dried on his skin.

The Chantry holds that hardship ennobles the soul. Based on that, Dorian must be nearly ready to join the ranks of the Anointed. His breath rasps with thirst and tiredness. Something haunts his faltering, ignorant progress through the ruin. His bleeding has not stopped.

Then he hears the voices: living voices, barely carried to him from behind.

_Run._

Whether it is an outside order or his own thought, Dorian gathers his ragged will and does as bid.

* * *

Cole leads them a breathless, skirting course through what Bull figures is an ancient living area. Sets of rooms branch off from a minor maze of wider corridors, not unlike the alleys of a city district. Once they have to scramble pell-mell across a plaza of shattered tiles and hide in a house while a group of three Venatori scour the open area with the fluttering lights of their thief's lanterns.

Many times they retrace their steps after they meet a dead end of toppled stonework, so that Bull is in constant risk of losing track of their progress. Between that and the recurrent feeling that he can't quite trust his senses, he's glad Cole seems to know where to go.

There has to be another way out, Bull tells himself. The entrance they used wasn't meant for regular traffic.

Lavellan stays close to Cole, speaking to him every time they stop. Bull doesn't think he sees her countenance change once from the resolute calm she took on.

Has she had to do this before? The Dalish tend towards fierce guardianship of their own, but they also choose the survival of the clan over the wellbeing of a single elf. His Dalish--whatever they called her in her clan--stands as proof of that.

Though her demeanour may hold, her pace is starting to lag by the time they emerge into a high, wide tunnel, a grander cousin to the passage where the Venatori first jumped them. It must be a main street or equivalent, running straight as far as their lantern can illuminate. Columns covered in alternating rows of relief and script rise along the walls at regular intervals.

Through the dust and grit and exhaustion, Bull smells a trickle of clean, moving air.

"Feel that?"

"Barely, but I do." Lavellan halts next to him, hugging the corner of a column.

"Hide the light!" Cole hisses in warning, and Bull pries down the copper panel so the lantern goes dark. They huddle down behind the column.

Peeking out from cover when your horns span the width of your shoulders is, in fact, a pain in the ass. Bull does his best, angling himself so that his shadow will blend into the patches of rubble on the floor.

A ruddy flame dances along the walls on their left, an exposed torch visible far beyond its own range. It reveals a stairway as broad as the whole corridor, which ascends for maybe two score steps and then splits off in two directions.

The breeze must be seeping down from somewhere on top of those stairs. Bull spies a few--four, maybe five--people on the first landing. Torchlight glances off their helmets and the boss of the shield slung on the back of the rightmost figure.

"There is the way out," Cole says, something taut and trembling in his tone. "Back to the sun and the sand. We left them behind."

"I count five guys." Bull retreats fully behind the column, pitching the conversation towards tactics before anyone can focus on lingering regrets. "Can't see if they have a mage."

"Wouldn't they have called a wisp for light?" Lavellan whispers. "Even so, I'm sure I can handle one mage." The absence of her heavy ashwood staff somehow thins her presence; more crucially, it means her spells will be more effort for the same gain.

If Lavellan's weariness is palpable, Cole is unusually sharp and vivid. "I will go first. They won't see me. I can clear the way."

"Easy there," Bull cuts in. "Shanking one of them is gonna pull the rest down on you." He has no grasp of the minutiae of how Cole's power of forgetfulness works, but he can't vanish with too much attention on him. Four Venatori trying to strike back is a lot of attention.

"We have to get out." The boy cants his face at Bull, the blue of his eyes bright even in the near darkness. "Then come back in. They wear down with every moment. She drinks them endlessly, trammels them, benights them."

Lavellan's mouth is a pinched line. She hovers close to Cole all the time, touching his shoulder, directing him with her voice. She's practically shepherded him this far.

The pressure in the back of Bull's skull has eased more the closer to the surface they come.

"Boss?" It's barely a question. "We're not coming back only for Dorian, are we?"

* * *

These are not ordinary guards, clad in mail and boiled leather and relying on firelight to see. Dorian thinks there are two behind him, stalking the feeble light of his swaying lantern without a need for one of their own.

If he were a Tevinter magister sent to explore a gloaming cave at the arse end of the known world, he might bring a few trinkets or charms to let his people navigate the dark. He takes a foolhardy hop across a fracture in the floor, tumbles around a corner, and has to stop to get his breath.

His head is a surging current of fear and purpose. It's all that keeps him afloat in the other stream around him: the Veil seems a snapping tarp in a stormwind, ready to be blown away by the force of the churning Fade.

Before him is a doorway. If he could get through and contrive to bar the door--

"There!" A woman's voice, breathless and hard. Two sets of shoes make a barely audible tap against the stone.

They've seen him. That means he has little to lose.

Dorian wrenches a spell wisp into being, and as soon as the glow limns a target for him--a short silhouette, balking against the wash of light--he loosens a fistful of flame towards the woman. She flips herself onto the floor at once, giving harsh sobs of pain but rolling to smother her smoking attire.

Barely in time, he throws himself away from the path of a flung knife. The other prowler has tucked himself against the wall to make a smaller target. Dorian braces for the stress of the successive spells, inhales deep, and casts.

His barrier bounces the second knife aside, and a welter of ice crackles up to trap the man's legs to the floor. The woman is scratching her way up, but Dorian pushes himself past the pulsing boundary where he knows he should stop.

 _You will not have me._ Right then that is all that matters. He can't fall here. He can't be taken.

He beckons to the small dark things winding about him, airy spirits of rot and ruin. They obey, as they always do, bending to his greater will without question.

She screams as they burrow into her flesh and slough it from her bones. Were the ice not hampering him, her companion might've outrun the spell. Dorian staggers onto his feet and, mercifully, feels the door turn inward under his hand.

He doesn't stay to listen to the man's drawn-out death throes.

* * *

Dazzling colours throb at the edges of his vision. Clinging to the single thread that keeps the spell wisp tethered seems to eat up all his concentration. The door thuds shut behind him, and he blinks at the large room like a prisoner emerging into daylight.

The only furnishing is a long table, a hefty slab of stone on squat legs. Around it, the floor has been cleaned of dust and debris so meticulously that Dorian can see his own blurred reflection in the burnished stone. Twin doors at the far end seem to be the only way out.

He needs to stop. He needs to drink, to rest, to get his bearings.

At his feet, an elegant, curving line of white bisects his dark mirror image on the floor. Old memory sticks his boots to those footings, and he follows the line to see it make a complete circle, perhaps two paces across. More intricate clusters of lines spread inward from the rim, forming shapes that his mind, however tarry, recognises with the same ease as the letters of the alphabet.

He can taste the Fade, honey and copper, saffron and rose, dew and blood, a sybaritic mixture of hues and aromas.

The floor is drawn full of summoning circles.

"Sweet Andraste," Dorian whispers, and would bless himself on a reflex of piety he most often does not feel if he could make his fingers move. Every circle gives off a shimmer of energy, which means that all of them are in use.

The Venatori are up to something far more perfidious than browsing through dwarven relics in the desert. A summoning on this scale could erode the Veil to such dreamy thinness. But what would be the point? He tries to align his thoughts for all that they thrash like fish tossed onto shore. _What is she trying to do?_

The sigils on the circle repeat a pattern he can almost make out. Conjure, beckon, entrap. Hold, pacify, channel. There are no commands drawn here. No direction for the summoned spirits.

 _Think, Dorian. Think, damn you._ He can't measure exact amounts, but even based on rough magnitudes, this room contains enough leashed power to bring down the whole underground complex.

 _You may give me the amulet Gereon Alexius used,_ Varelia said, _and your knowledge of his time spells besides._

"You absolute _idiot_." Dorian barely knows that he means _her_ and not himself. Horror claws through his strain to lift one thought into perfect clarity.

He cannot stay here. If it takes a miracle from the silent heavens, he must find the others. He must warn them.

Rushing dots of colour engulf his field of sight. He feels his knees give way, utterly without his leave, as he topples sideways across the white line. His cheek strikes stone, rattling his teeth. His spell wisp dwindles, as if it, too, had forced itself past all its limits.

Darkness, for a beat.

 _You have come, little mortal_ , the voice whispers like a sweet summer wind. _Hear me now._

* * *

Bull had assumed they were here to kick some Venatori ass. There was going to be a side of hopefully rescuing some people before they ended up under a blood mage's sacrificial knife, or died from starvation or were worked to death. He wasn't picky on the details, as long as they could prevent them from coming true.

His borrowed sword has a decent edge. It bloodies the pad of his thumb at just a bit of pressure, so that's fine. Lavellan assures him that she can handle their defences, which leaves Bull and Cole to get in close and wreak havoc as quickly as they can.

So that they can get out, return with reinforcements, and free Dorian and a bunch of spirits trapped by the Venatori.

That is where the plan sticks in Bull's craw. Gooseflesh creeps along his painted back when he even recalls Lavellan's explanation: somewhere below, Cole senses a mass of spirits in constant agony.

Bull doesn't want to think of spirits as something that can feel pain. Wants even less to think of what could _hurt_ them.

The guards--six in total--have a pattern, up and down the stairs in pairs. Such a proportionally heavy concentration of soldiers tells Bull that this must be a choke point; the Venatori expect them here. When one pair of guards climbs up to the landing, the other two couples should be at the upper ends of the branching stairs.

It seems simple enough. Get the enemy to spread out, then strike hard and fast. Bull shakes himself as if that could shrug off the fanged doubts clinging to his back, boring into his mind.

There is a task in front of him, one he knows how to do.

"Now?" Cole asks, crouched under the column.

"Now," Lavellan confirms. Bull drags his attention back to the present as Cole erupts into motion, the dark swallowing him before he even fades himself from memory.

They'll leave the lantern here. The chance of it going out in the fracas is too high, so Lavellan will conjure light for them. Bull tries to ignore just how well that went last time.

_Stay here. Move forward. That's how you can help._

That's what they're trying to do. Save themselves so they can save Dorian.

He watches the two guards step up onto the landing in near unison, the one on the left holding the torch aloft. The air flickers behind the soldier on the right. Even in the restless light the spurt of arterial blood shows clear as Cole opens his throat with a single swift stroke.

The second guard bellows a warning, tinted with terror.

Lavellan's barrier sweeps around Bull's shoulders like a mantle of balmy air. Then he is moving in stride with her, both of them poised towards the fight.

* * *

Bull grabs the soldier by a pauldron, tugs him in close and shoves his sword artlessly through the man's mail shirt. The links shriek, surely blunting the blade, but it gets the job done. Bull pauses to free his opponent's weapon, a heavy one-handed axe that he carried in addition to the shield and long dagger that now tumble from his nerveless fingers.

The Ben-Hassrath taught Bull to turn anything into a weapon: a chair, a rock, a splinter of wood. His own body. Still, the axe sits easier in his hand than the Tevinter _gladius_ did. He shrinks back towards Lavellan, who has taken the centre of the landing, while Cole dashes into view on her right side.

Just in time. The other four have heard the commotion. With fluidity that hints at long practice, one of each couple draws their weapon and starts down the stairs, while the others remain higher, shrugging short recurve bows from their shoulders.

 _Damn._ "Boss, archers!" Bull calls without turning.

"I see them!" First bolstering the barrier that glints around their little group, Lavellan sets her sights on the bowman above Cole.

Bull watches the guard on his side descend. She's eschewed a shield, wielding instead a pair of sabre and parrying dagger. The landing is broad enough that he can pull her onto level with him, eliminating her higher position.

"Come on, mainland scum!" he hollers in his best Tevene. A uniquely Seheron insult there. "I used to kick whelps like you back into your boats so hard they didn't stop 'til they ran aground in Qarinus!"

He's pretty sure she chuckles as she half vaults down at him.

In five circling passes, he puts the axe through her spine with a crunch of bone.

Despite her promise to restrict herself to defence, Lavellan pelts the archers with hindering ice, while their arrows are deflected from her waning barriers. Cole still tangles with the other melee fighter, a hulk of a man who keeps shaking off the stings of his blades.

No rest, no elfroot, no lyrium. All that tips Bull's measure of the fight: they're already pouring everything they have into the effort. Lavellan's spell wisp glimmers steady, as if defying the rancorous memory of the first ambush.

She stands, as she knows she must. For how long?

Squaring his shoulders, Bull braces himself to seize the moment and tackle one of the archers. His limbs are turning leaden, but the woman is distracted, frost chinking from her body as she claws it from her face and helmet.

Vasaad would laugh at him. Any of his cherished ghosts would. Letting himself falter after what can't be more than a day of deprivation.

Bull pounds up the steps with a raw cry of challenge, to nearly hack off the archer's bow arm with his first swing. She screams in naked horror as he pulls his axe back for a second blow.

It never lands. Incoming footfalls alert Bull just in time, before a leather-clad prowler pounces at his back from above. He feels a blade skirl along the layer of vitaar, snagging and scratching but not going through.

The second serrated knife, in turn, digs a deep, ugly slash under his left arm as he spins to meet the attacker. The arm dangles, a loose hunk of flesh and bone, and Bull knows that the blade slit muscle. He scampers down a step, back towards his companions, axe held at the ready. _Shit. Shit. Where'd this guy come from?_

"No!" Cole's shout makes Bull look against his better wisdom. The prowler trailing him slows down, though, seeming to relax a fraction. A sudden, unearthly chill swirls in the air, like Vivienne's quick-step spell.

Clear blue light washes into the green shine of Lavellan's spell wisp ten stairs below. A spout of Qunlat curses bursts from Bull.

The Venatori magister stands on the landing, tall and simmering with such power that even Bull can see it as a flowing halo about her form. Her robes settle around her as the icy wind that spurred her up the stairs dies down. Behind her stands another mage, a willowy man clutching a gem-capped staff; his flank is guarded by one more of the troublesome skirmishers.

" _Seize them_!" Varelia's composed voice comes out as a snarl.

Heedless of his injury, Bull lobs the axe at the prowler menacing him. In a human's hand, the weapon's weight would foil the trick, but it spins head over handle and sinks into the prowler's belly with a meaty thud. Gasping, he staggers; Bull doesn't stay to watch him fall.

He should be ten steps below. He stoops to grab a sabre from the fallen archer's belt, and in that moment, raw magic explodes across the landing in a cascade of baleful green.

Lavellan, wielding the Anchor.

For a moment the fountaining power drowns out all else, and Bull can only see her silhouette, left hand braced with her right at the wrist. A brief medley of screams rises and falls from within the surge as it rolls outward into misty, fading waves. His teeth ache with the force of gritting them.

 _Please_ , he thinks, unsure of at whom. _Crap, just give us this one._

The Anchor's power parts to reveal two figures still standing on the landing. Varelia and the other mage are encased in a quaking barrier that the man is holding up. The stone around them covered in wet, tattered remains: the bare vestiges of their soldiers, torn apart by the surge. Empty-handed before them, Lavellan sways on her feet.

Past Varelia, a telltale flicker of movement flows down the opposite staircase, and Bull recognises Cole in mid-motion. The boy will only need an instant to put a blade in her back, so Bull should--

The magister cants up her free hand, a gesture of denial, and Cole stumbles as he's brought short by a wall of force springing up around him. His raised dagger bounces off from it with a ringing noise like a struck glass bowl.

"Let him go!" Lavellan's demand is too reedy. Bull makes his feet move step by step, fixing his grip on his latest stolen weapon.

"Let him go?" Another note is wound into Varelia's voice, repeating her words in a slight, cold echo. "An incongruous request. I must assume he's the cause of all this ruckus. He slipped through all my wards."

"You can't bind me. I am me," Cole says, strained. "I am more me than you are you, twisted, twinned, tampered. You think they're just clay, for you to scoop out by the handful."

"Shit, this again." Bull sighs to himself. She's done something creepy with the spirits, but apparently the amulet Solas suggested is working for Cole. He's three stairs from Lavellan. His left arm hurts a damn lot to move, unless he calls upon his last reserves. _Their_ last reserves. But he's yet to see a mage that could withstand a reaving warrior that got in close.

"I can trammel you quite adequately, half-thing. Your company might take different measures." Varelia turns, leaving Cole on her flank, and then the only warning Bull has is the way her mouth curls. " _Recēde_!"

Bull's heard Dorian shout the same word when he gets thronged on the battlefield. When the first syllable forms, he lunges forward.

The force spell strikes Lavellan full in the chest, sending her arms thrashing wildly as she is hurtled into the air. The same push lashes at Bull, but his greater bulk keeps him grounded, and he dives for her just as she sails over the edge of the landing.

Her left hand scratches at his vambrace. His fingers grip cloth: her surcoat or scarf or cloak. He leans back as hard as he can, all too aware of the steep stairs too near beneath.

Stone shifts under his boot.

* * *

_Hear me now._

The darkness dissolves into dancing spots of leaf-dappled light. Dorian's next breath drags the overwhelming smells of dew and dirt into his lungs. He's encased and infused in a mist-laden summer morning, moss pillowing his stinging head, soaking up the blood trickling from his side.

_I have you safe, little mortal. We may speak here._

_No._ Dorian tries to make the word into a phalanx surrounding him. _No. This is a dream. You have me in the Fade, but that's the whole of it. Safety hardly enters into it._

He has not said yes to anything. Nothing's been offered, but that is ever only a matter of time. He tries to rifle through old lessons and newer personal observations for some inkling of what he might be dealing with. A sloth demon, tempting him with rest and lassitude? One of desire, drawn to his present need and unspoken yearnings in equal measure?

"I am Dorian of House Pavus," he mutters through a creaking throat. "I am--" _Son of Halward and Aquinea, apprenticed to Gereon Alexius, initiated by the College of Minrathous_ , and so on and so on until one's blighted head might spin.

The concept is simple: words are a channel, and as they may reinforce magic so they may reinforce the self. One makes a litany of core truths to keep oneself centered.

 _A dead root raises no water_ , the voice says. _No sap runs in a withered tree._

At Redcliffe Dorian burst out on his father in righteous fury and marched out with the meeting cut halfway. His teacher's ashes were scattered on a mountainside outside Skyhold into a northerly wind, the closest Dorian could come to sending him home. The Minrathous College would spit in his face.

"You could at least leave it to me to realise my own futilities." The moss is soft under his back. No, there is stone there, hard and chill.

_You are trapped here as I am. Time will suck us both dry, and soon._

"Hah," Dorian says. What is time to a demon, which spends its existence in the malleable vistas of the Fade, unmade and remade at its fancy? Even if it finds itself wreathed in material shape, destroying that shape merely sends it back to reform in dreams.

He, on the other hand. He has an unsewn wound that had not clotted, last he knew.

 _She has made me know._ A bitter, briny gust shakes the ephemeral boughs. _Time is a mortal thing, wound in the wind, bound in the bones of your world. But she has made us know._

"What?" Oh, Maker's grace, he should not ask. His body lies across the symbols of a summoning circle. He breached the boundary, and now the demon--is it a demon?--can touch him.

Until then, it had sat caged in the circle, pinned and immobile. No one had made demands or cajoled it for power, only left it there to be flayed of its essence.

Dorian looks up at the branches that are not there. "What have they done to you?"

Silence like a gathered breath. The feeling that stirs in him is uncomfortably close to pity. _That_ is hardly conducive to his continued survival.

_She is dead wood in the stream, carried without her own will, but she grasps for roots, for tendrils, for solid earth. She thinks we can help her reach. So she took us and she held us here._

Understanding jolts him again in too short a time, turning his gut even through the fugue he's under.

"Put me back." He's asked now, he's taken the proverbial step off the edge, but he has to see. "You hauled me here for a reason, no? Let me see. Let me see the circle."

_There will be pain._

"Isn't there always?" Dorian huffs, affecting courage for the spirit that can pluck at his thoughts. "Just do it-- _ahh_ , Andraste's holy arse, that _hurts_."

 _I told you so_ , the spirit says, dry as dead leaves.

He tumbles back into sand-smelling darkness, black as tar for the moment it takes him to gasp his way through the pain and tether a spell wisp to his will again. His eyelashes are caked with dust. Raising himself onto hands and knees, Dorian forces himself to focus on the sigils of the smudged circle. He was on the very edge of understanding when he fainted, and whether it's some trace of spirit magic or his own stubbornness that brought him back, he'd best use the time wisely.

"She's using you as... conduits," he says. "A spirit brought through the Veil is like a needle pushed into cloth, no? A small point of the Fade, puncturing the Veil. It's never meant to linger there, but she's... stopped you here. So she can keep the way open." His fingers tremble even as he lets them lie on a row of Tevinter sigils. He might admire Varelia's technical artistry if the end result weren't so monstrous.

_Yes. She makes us linger, one after another. When one dries out, she draws in the next, as if we were nothing but water from an endless wellspring._

"Is that even possible?" Dorian breaks into a coughing fit. Did the blade nick a lung after all? "You're spirits. You can't exactly perish."

_Neither should mortals wade the currents of time. Yet she seeks not only to dam the flow but to direct it._

Oh, that almost looked like dodging his question, but it brings Dorian face to face with the crux of the matter. He hears a grating chortle and only then realises it's the sound of his own bitter amusement.

"Such a smart woman, and all she can think to do is throw more power at the problem."

Not that Dorian can entirely fault her chain of reasoning. A similar logic kept throwing him and Alexius for a loop--a hundred frustrating, time-consuming loops--until they got their hands on a few particular texts on elven magic predating the conquest of Arlathan.

Time magic was never about power. It was about subtlety, the ability to pry apart two inseparable moments and slide in between them. That was all the amulet did: it allowed him to hone his will to a pinprick edge that would, proverbially speaking, be keen enough to prise a wedge into time.

He's about to speak again when a spasm of agony rakes through his body, swelling from a dull throb into choking intensity.

_There isn't much of you left._

Curse it. Curse Dorian himself and his arrogant choice of necromantic magic, which is antithetical to the dreamy, reclusive spirits that can bestow ease and healing. He can always beckon them, but they're reluctant to answer.

He has Varelia's secrets in his grasp, and now they'll fade with his ebbing life. The others will never know what became of him. If Cole found them. If they made it to the surface. If--

_There is a solution, Dorian Pavus, if you will hear me._

Arduously Dorian lowers himself onto his stomach again, his arms too shaky to hold his weight. His hair sticks to something on the floor: a smear of his own slowly spreading blood. "I can't very well stop you, can I?"

 _You can._ The spirit sounds grave. _I cannot force you without compromising my own being. But you can walk our world and see with your waking eyes, and thus, if you consent, I can join with you. I can repair your form. I can--_

" _No_." Dorian spits the word, every relaxed defence slamming up around his tattering self. "I am injured, not out of my wits."

He is dying. It may be a matter of hours or days, but it is the truth.

_You will have your life._

"Some things are worse than death." Felix's words, from so long ago. It might be fitting to think of Felix now. His wound burns and so do his eyes, too parched for tears.

 _Worse than the deaths of those others?_ Dorian hears a faraway chorus of crackling and humming, like a copse of trees in a high wind. _Their images sear in you when you struggle for strength. Your end will spell their ends also._

"I... How do you know that?" He can't help the horrible trace of hope in his voice.

_I can touch you, and they are bound to you with ties that I can see. Common purpose, trust, perseverance. You would not abandon them in need._

"If--if you are a demon, I do have to commend your creativity." He wonders who will find him here, eventually, fallen on his face in a Venatori fanatic's hidden workroom. "Your lures are quite meagre. No promises to whisk me out of this odious desert, or..."

 _"Demon" is your word, Dorian Pavus._ He could swear the spirit sighs. _They are all my brethren. You name us for our aspects, but those aspects are born of your own perceptions in the first place._

The air is dense with flowers and decay. Dorian inhales until it seems to fill his entire body. "I... I gave you my name. I think it's only fair you complete the introductions, wouldn't you say?"

It slides probing tendrils strong as suturing silk across the wound in his side, and its name rings in his ears, a single perfect peal of meaning.

He makes his choice then.

* * *

The uppermost stair gives under Bull's heel and sends crumbs of stone ricocheting down. He's only saved by his hasty backwards tilt, which tumbles him and Lavellan onto a heap on the lip of the landing. The stone meets his back and her weight his chest, knocking the wind out of him.

Too close. He blinks through the lights shimmering in his vision. Fuck, this escape's been a string of near misses.

Bull's barely thought that thought--the first that isn't a keening need for air--when he smells thunder, that sharp, pure scent that heralds a cloudburst.

Storm magic in the making. Off to his left, Varelia hisses, "You would've had your uses, but you are becoming entirely too irksome to let live." 

He heaves in another breath, fumbling for a response on some defiant instinct. Lavellan's fingers, flat on Bull's ribs where she caught herself, dig into his vitaar-hardened skin.

"Handle the other mage," she says, so low that it might take Bull's ears to hear her at all. "I'll slow her down."

 _Slow her down_ isn't quite on par with what's he's come to expect from the Inquisitor, but he'll take it. He'll take anything. The heart of the stirring storm is at the centre of the landing, and they're only alive because a casting of that magnitude takes time.

 _There's only the two of them. She can't keep casting so fast._ Keeping the company of mages has taught him that much: the quick spellwork that combat demands tires them out apace with swinging a weapon. If she has to play by that rule anymore.

Her companion probably does, though.

Pain has carved itself a web of red, winding beds throughout his body. As Lavellan heaves herself off him and up onto one knee, Bull makes every one of those channels flow to his will.

White light spilling from her open palms, she thrusts them out towards Varelia. Behind the magister, Bull catches a flashing view of Cole, hammering vainly at the force field, but the boy is a secondary concern now. He rushes towards the mage guarding Varelia's back instead.

The pain ebbs from his limbs. His left arm obeys him again. Though his only weapon is the too-small sabre, at least he has some last-ditch tricks left. The mage rounds to meet his charge, eyes wide but jaw set, freeing a hand from his staff to fire off a spell.

Lavellan's dispelling charm crashes against Varelia's building magic with a resonant thunderclap sound. The other mage starts, and Bull seizes the opening. Grabbing the man's staff below his hand, Bull hauls him in with a ferocious yank and plunges the sabre into his ribs. The man screams in wordless shock as Bull wrenches the blade free again.

His grim satisfaction at the sound lasts about two heartbeats.

"Bull!" Lavellan shuffles back towards him, so he lets the bleeding mage crumple at his feet. With any luck, the stab found a kidney, which means the blood loss will undo the man in short order.

He should know better by now than to trust in their luck. When he straightens himself, Lavellan falls in on his left side, her breaths coming in swift gasps, too harsh for her to tame into any semblance of calm. The moment Bull releases the reaving, he might as well be done for; he knows the ache growing in his limbs.

A tremor passes through the stonework underneath them, as if the ancient mortar veins had tired of their burden. It seems to make his bones chatter in sympathy.

"You cannot win, you understand?"

And there's the thrice-blasted magister, her knuckles tight around the haft of her staff. She barely sounds winded.

"She's drawing power from somewhere," Lavellan says, clearly uncaring if Varelia hears. "Far too much to be natural. It must be--"

" _Stop her_!" Cole throws himself at the translucent wall of his cage. "She's drinking them, draining them, until they're dross and dregs and _done_."

"The spirits she's trapped," Bull finishes Lavellan's thought. The floor keeps shaking at shortening intervals. 

"You've set me back _weeks_ , you miserable degenerates." Varelia reverts to Tevene in her spleen. "If I have to coerce Pavus with your corpses, then so be it."

Is she conjuring some new horror, or is her rising temper echoing into their physical surroundings? Dark shapes move at the hem of her blue wisp-light: Bull realises with a sinking feeling that a wary group of her soldiers is closing in along the left-hand staircase leading up.

A bow shaft creaks when someone takes aim, but from that vantage, her guards could just shoot a volley.

Lavellan makes a noise in her throat, a small, raw sigh of exhaustion. Bull knows that noise. Not from her in the specific, but from countless comrades who began to flag and unravel under the strife and misery of Seheron. They curled into their cots, stared hollow-eyed into their supper, or simply stopped in mid-fight to let a Fog Warrior drive a spear through their hearts.

Bull also knows this: that despair is a death knell. It nearly drowned him when Vasaad died.

That same pressure clenches around his heart. He doesn't share the worshipful attitude that half the Inquisition has towards their reticent, high-hearted Inquisitor, but he's had himself a little fooled.

She crawled out from the ruins at the Chantry's Conclave. She's survived Corypheus and his archdemon, the wintry desolation of the Frostbacks, a walk through the Fade, and more architecture falling on her than any mortal can be expected to dodge. She can't be killed by a bunch of shithead Venatori.

An arrow to the throat would do it, though.

He could give his life and it would not save her. It would not save Cole and Dorian. They'd be left to suffer whatever more prolonged fates enraged magisters can devise.

Dying for a friend never sounded like a bad way to go, but it might also be the easy way out.

When Lavellan touches the hand of his injured arm, he thinks it's a signal--she's got some plan, some surprise to spring at the last moment--and then understands that it's only a handclasp. A farewell.

Cole has gone silent. Another bow bends taut above, someone barking instruction.

Bull grips her fingers in answer and lets himself remember Dorian's face from the morning, his amused exasperation, the sure sweeps of his brushstrokes across Bull's back. Warmth there, and regret of a kind he can't parse, so he allows it to be buried by the gentler feeling.

People always come and go in his life, easy as the wind. He should've said something.

Then three things happen in blinding, blistering succession.

The tremors through the floor contract upon a spot three strides to the right of Bull, and a figure coated in scree bursts up from the masonry, tattered garments covering it from immediate scrutiny.

Varelia whips around on her heel. Her mouth is round in astonishment, her eyes wide and glossy with it, her composure cracked like an ice-split cliff. "Blessed Dumat, it cannot be."

A pillar of fire swirls up around her, so hot that it shimmers blue as dragon breath. Her scream curdles with frustration rather than agony as she vanishes under the flame that soars and branches. The pillar spits forth five blazing globes that plummet towards the archers. Bull squints against the brightness as the Venatori scatter, one diving foolhardily down the stairs until an orb switches direction in the air and smothers her in a gout of flame and smoke.

Then, with a resounding chime, the force cage around Cole springs free. Lavellan clutches Bull's hand, too stunned by the spectacle to let go, and Bull couldn't jostle for her it. He's probably forgotten how his mouth shuts, with the way he's gaping.

The figure--a person, under all that earth--lets its hand fall. A long-boned, elegant hand. The dust-smeared robes might be white, cinched across the chest in a style more dashing than practical.

"You came," Cole says, his words barely audible over the blaze. "It cost you both, but you came. The fight isn't over, but now you fight with the force of two."

The stench of cooked flesh wells from the flames, which snap and hum and belch rancid smoke. Dorian did always favour fire.

Now he cants his head towards his three friends, and his eyes burn with the wild green of the Fade.

  


[ ](http://68.media.tumblr.com/425c4f0e05eff46401d82259310c72b8/tumblr_od7v67W9hG1qztk45o2_1280.jpg)

  


* * *


	4. Pyre

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Recommended listening: [Bear McCreary: _Apocalypse_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDAedoUZPNE)

All of Bull's thoughts freeze--it _is_ Dorian, his gestures, his stance, and the odd sweet whitewood smell of his magic--and thaw again into viscous, twisted strands of panic.

"The Creators preserve us." Lavellan finds her tongue before Bull. Her gaze is fixed on Dorian and the receding fires. "What have you _done_?"

His eye sockets brim with featureless green. Bull wants to look away, but horror holds him rooted.

" _He has lent me his form, and I have lent him my strength._ " Glowy eyes, bad. Worse yet is the familiar sound of Dorian's voice, its lively cadence gone, warped into a many-toned whispering that isn't the work of a human throat.

"Boss," Bull hears himself say. "Please."

_Please tell me this is not happening._

He came around to the idea of mages without collars and chains long ago. Any saarebas would immolate themselves long before submitting to the beguiling voices of the Fade, but that is how the Qun makes them. His time with the Inquisition showed him so many other paths: Solas and his uncanny affinity for the spirits, Vivienne and her will of sheer steel, Dorian and his wayward, deep-buried integrity.

Of course Bull worked out how to take each of them down if it came to that. His will to follow through quails as do his thoughts.

The fire dissipates into cinder and smoke, the light dropping with it. Bull barely registers it when Lavellan murmurs a word to summon her spell wisp again.

 _There's a demon in him. He's an--an abomination._ A late-learned word, in the Common, meaning a living mage possessed by a creature of the Fade. An irrevocable loss of sense and self. There's movement around him, moans of agony, fingers scoring on the floor, the chafe of mail links. Bull can't focus on any of it.

"Dorian." He forces the name across his lips. He's answered by an unwavering green stare. "Dorian, come on."

"He can't hear you, Bull," Lavellan says, her voice defeated. "Be on guard." She wants to strike the first blow as little as he does. Yet it'd--it'd be a mercy.

" _You need not fear_ ," says the thing that isn't Dorian. " _Dorian Pavus is not lost to you. I am Fortitude, and I--_ "

"You are mine." Varelia enunciates each brief word. Soot streaks her face and ash shakes free from her hair as she lifts herself onto her knees, but she must have got off a barrier, because despite her filthy state she didn't get roasted alive.

Hatred shears through Bull, dark and clean. Cole shifts on his right, his grip flexing on his dagger hilts.

" _I am Fortitude, and I have come to end your torture and ill use of my kin, Varelia Anaxis._ " Dorian's voice hums like a forest in a gale; it'd terrify Bull if the burgeoning sense of loss left any room for it.

Varelia crouches next to her mage companion, who, Bull realises with a start, wails weakly now and then. His light-coloured robe is plastered to his back and side with blood, but he's breathing. Did her barrier reach him, too?

"You are a _tool_ for my great work," she snarls, "and I will have what I need from you both."

Fuck, fuck, fuck. Bull might as well be fighting a wildfire with a handful of sand. Things swirl and change in his head and right in front of him faster than he can grasp them. His left arm is becoming dead weight again; he has no grit nor concentration to sustain the reaving.

Varelia slaps her hand down against the bloody smear on her companion's back. A squelching tug pulls through Bull, an abrupt nausea of the mind. The thinness of the Veil magnifies the backwash of spells, but he hasn't felt this one before.

"Stop her!" Lavellan shouts in high, hoarse warning. "Whatever it takes, don't let her--"

Her command shatters Bull's fugue an instant too late.

Blood from the man's wound forms a thick crimson mist around Varelia, winding in serpentine coils about her arm as she points a forefinger at Dorian, who faces her with a perversely solemn mien. His expression should never be that stifled, that composed.

Just as Bull takes the first step towards the magister, she loosens the spell.

Cole dashes light-footed straight at her, overtaking Bull and diving in. Instead of sinking his blade into Varelia, he jerks the groaning mage up by his robes to slash a line across the back of his neck.

The flinty part of Bull's mind that dragged him through Seheron with most of his sanity intact, says, _Blood mages feed on pain. A quick death cuts off their power._

Then that shred of reason disintegrates as Dorian screams.

He crumples forward, fingers gouging at his face so that Bull fears for his eyes. His muscles seem to spasm and jump against his will, and his nails are dark with blood when his hands fist in his hair instead. He keeps his nails short, carefully filed and rounded. The force it took to break his skin means that it blighted _hurt_.

"Merciful Mythal, no." The spell wisp quivers at Lavellan's shoulder like a guttering candle, betraying her anguish and exhaustion.

"What in the void," Bull manages, a parched, half-formed question.

Slowly Varelia stands, right hand angled towards Dorian, the left one up in a warding gesture at Cole. "I see you now, you cursed nuisance. I can think a quicker thought than your daggers." Her sides heave with haggard breaths.

"She has them both." Cole shrinks back a step, though his coiled stance remains firm. "They unspun her tricks and threads, so she had to take his life. Rueful, ruthless--the work must go on. It still can."

"It _will_ ," says Varelia, with horrible conviction. "I would've rather that you had told me, Pavus. However, if I must have Misery recite your knowledge for me, that will do."

" _And may I have him when you are through with him, sweet lady?_ "

Dorian has raised his head. No. The _thing_ in him, speaking in a rasp like a stick dragged over gritty ice, has raised his head. The green flame in his eyes has become an ashen film over each, and Bull thought nothing could look worse than the Fade glowing out of them.

Bull's entire life has been a rowdy, sometimes gleeful, sometimes dutiful liaison with disaster. Not a lot is left in the world that can daunt him.

This does.

"Perhaps," Varelia tells the demon. "If he fascinates you so."

" _He does, he does_." If the spirit's voice sighed wind-like, the demon grinds its words like chewing on pebbles. Bull looks at Varelia not because she's the greater threat but because he can't look at Dorian's mouth shaping the sounds.

" _So many toothsome morsels that he's desperate to keep hidden._ "

Lavellan's hands press into fists.

"None of us care," she says valiantly.

" _You don't have to, lovely, lost elfling. I do. He does. Such as--_ " The demon smacks Dorian's lips. Bull grimaces. " _How can he ever stand out from your shadow? Your ascent to glory--it gnaws, it inspires, it dismays. He can never decide, and you must never know._ "

"How positively Tevinter of him. He so professed to be above all that." Varelia raises a soot-smudged eyebrow, and Bull feels a staggering desire to smash the smile off her face. A sheer, violent urge to hurt her.

"Dorian isn't like that," Cole says. "He burns so bright. He can be a beacon, he knows so."

" _And you! You despair him with your very being, small sideways sibling. You spout his secrets willy-nilly for all to hear, because you want to_ help _. He's been hurt by so many. Parents, lovers, friends, and you just have to get your deft fingers on every old ache he'd rather hide._ "

 _Make it stop_ , Bull thinks. They're deadlocked by their reluctance to endanger Dorian, but how much worse can things even get? If the greatest good they can do is--is a swift end, then maybe that must be so. The thought is like swallowing gaatlok.

" _What about you then?_ " The sound of the footfalls is Dorian's, but the gait is not. It shuffles along the floor as the demon steps towards Bull. He doesn't shirk.

"My practice on assholes is not to let them talk too much."

A hacking laugh erupts into the air. " _I see! You must not think him a complete waste of your time! I wonder if that'd delight or dispirit him more._ "

"Funny," Bull says. "Thought you only cared about his suffering."

" _Of course I do. It's what I am for._ " Dorian's lip peels back from his teeth as the demon grins. " _But you are an excellent cause of his anguish, O witty one. How he wants. How he fears. How he's in agony over if you know. He drew flame on your skin, but it is you that he wants to consume him--_ "

Ponderous, purposeful brushstrokes, dabbing and swishing in whatever pattern Dorian had decided on. Bull thought of Tevene ribaldries and gave no comment, even though Dorian took his time and then some. The morning warmed around them.

"Shut the fuck up," Bull growls, unable to bite back his fury.

Dorian would want him to put an end to this. He has the Tevinter blade in his hand.

Make it fast. As Cole did. As Bull himself did, more than once, long ago on Seheron.

He lets the movement build in his muscles, ready to drag one more burst of speed from his body, and then Lavellan rattles off a string of Elvish, trailed by a simple command.

"Kill her!"

As she calls out, she leaps forward. An unfolding pattern of spinning shapes flares under Dorian's feet, one graceful curve streaming into the next. In another blink Bull would've gone for his throat.

But Lavellan gave him an order. He gave her his word.

Cole might've made it a gentle kill, a slice across the neck arteries, a thrust to the heart. Bull lets the sabre fall from his hand and hurls himself at Varelia. She stands erect and alert as her palm flashes with a repulsion spell. Reflexively he drops himself low, the wave of the spell buffeting across him and knocking Cole back a few teetering steps.

She doesn't have her vast reserves of stolen mana at hand anymore. Bull dives into that vanishing gap in which every mage is vulnerable after casting, his good hand grabbing her head, his weaker one her shoulder. In spite of his abused muscles protesting the strain, he gets a proper hold and twists.

Her fingers, scrabbling in vain at his chest, drop nerveless at the crack of a joint. Slackening his hands, he lets her body slide to the floor.

"Fuck." The word is raw as it breaks from him. "Shit, crap, _fuck_."

"I'm sorry," Lavellan mumbles from behind him.

 _Don't think being sorry's gonna get us out of this one, boss._ Whatever her glyph was for, it clearly stopped the demon, or the thing would be raining spite and balefire down on them right now. They survived. They have a way out.

You don't come back from a having a demon in your head.

He feels like a husk. A worn pile of bone and muscle, fat and sinew, his stubborn heart barely pumping enough blood to keep him moving.

Cole's feet thump on the stone, so loud that he's not thinking of quiet. Bull could maybe use some quiet. And a stiff drink. Ten stiff drinks.

"Thank you," Lavellan says to the side. Then, "Bull? Did you hear me?"

"Yeah." He can't make his feet move.

"I am sorry. I couldn't cast any sooner, so I let it talk for too long." She moves closer, but doesn't touch him. A scant relief.

_Did you finish it?_

He barely knows what this is, this peculiar longing for oblivion. He'd like nothing better than to stop, to yield, to forget. How many dead can one person carry?

"The glyph won't last much longer," Lavellan continues, "and the demon might--might make him a lot stronger than he is. Physically, I mean. It would be best if you hold him down."

Bull looks her up and down, feeling like a dreamer waking by inches. Alarm tightens her features, but not grief. Not the agony of a dead end or a hopeless cause. She has a clouded glass vial in her hand, containing a measure of purple, shimmering liquid.

Magebane.

Magebane neutralises; it does not kill.

A small part of the obfuscation lifts from his mind, enough for understanding to lance through. All is not lost. He turns to her, piecemeal.

"Right," he says. "Just tell me what to do."

* * *

Up the stairs on the right is a passage where Lavellan claims to smell a breeze. They pick through the scorched corpses for the Venatori for a smattering of food and metal flasks that the spellfire did not utterly destroy. Some of them twitch or moan feebly at contact. Bull wastes no time on any mercy kills--and neither does Cole.

A mage's staff must be crafted and enchanted specifically, so Lavellan can't repurpose one. She does pilfer two lyrium potions from the male mage, and pinches her nose and quaffs them both so she can heal the worst of the damage to Bull's arm. Bull finds himself a one-handed axe and a long dagger. He wouldn't complain on a normal day, and he says nary a word now. Once he and Lavellan have eaten what they can, they start climbing: Lavellan in front, Bull in the middle with his burden of knocked-out mage, and Cole watching their rear.

At length they come to a narrow anteroom, bookended by two stone doors on silverite hinges. At least there are doors.

"I don't hear them anymore," Cole says. He has one dagger out, its edge rippling with the light of Lavellan's spell wisp. Bull's heard nothing but their own steps for the last--several moments, quarter of an hour?--but Cole may not mean only physical sounds. "Choking, charring, crumbling. A smell like father's kitchen."

 _Good_. The sentiment comes to Bull unbidden. Fire's a bad way to go.

"Here." Lavellan unclasps her cloak and spreads it on the floor. Glass-smooth inlays of obsidian in the sandstone shimmer with her reflection. "Put him down."

It's a small mercy that Dorian would tumble limp from his grip, but Bull goes to one knee and sets him on the cloak. His head lolls back before Lavellan tucks a scarf under his neck. Lyrium dust is smeared across his mouth, a vestige of the magebane.

Bull remembers how Dorian's body jerked, sharp and forceful, as he slapped the cloth on his face and made him inhale.

There's no time for that. _Do what matters._ While Lavellan lays out what supplies she could salvage from Varelia's pouches and Cole lights a lantern stolen from the Venatori, Bull shuts the metal bar on the door at the far end. The ruin is likely empty, and they only have time until the magebane runs its course, but the precaution helps him focus.

Lavellan sketched out her plan as they went through Venatori pockets, in what for her were brutally blunt terms.

Bull listened, nodded, and did not ask the question that looms before him now.

"So... this ritual from your Keeper," he begins, needled by his own disjointed manner. Cole scoots closer, too, hovering by Lavellan's side. "Good thing you already asked something tougher of me today than going to sleep in this place."

"It's not precisely sleep," she says. "More like a trance--but yes, for all intents and purposes, the subject will sleep so they can enter the dreams of the person who's the focus of the ritual. In our case, Dorian."

Dorian's eyes are shut in the repose induced by the poison, and Bull is bitterly glad. With a bit of goodwill, he seems to just be taking a nap. He's dirty and bruised, his robes matted with dried blood from a wound that made Lavellan reel when she cut the cloth for a look at it. She spent another measure of her lessening strength on mending it partway.

"Go in, find the demon, kick its ass, make him pop back into himself." Bull manages a dry, morbid chortle. "Easy when you put it that way."

"There's one more hurdle."

"Out with it," Bull says when she pauses.

"I don't have all the components." She glances at her meagre pile, chalk and herbs and incense. "But the magister had this." From the breast of her surcoat, she draws an emerald cut into a cube shape, slipped onto an unassuming steel-link chain. Alexius's amulet. The root cause of this whole fucking misadventure.

That, and the discoveries held only in Dorian's head.

"This is a thaumaturgical focus," Lavellan says. "I can use it to strengthen the ritual, but it might not stay intact. The magic is taxing. The caster should spare days for preparations."

"It mattered to Dorian," Cole puts in, crouched down over Dorian's still form. "Days spent choosing the right stone, the right shape, the right size. Winter in Minrathous then, the rain like a mourning veil hung from the loggia. He can never forget."

Bull almost asks _Can you still hear him?_ but that's a hope beyond what he can bear. Shit, that he should want Cole to be able to pry into anyone's thoughts.

"It's not like we can ask his opinion." He sighs. "I'd rather have him back with us and spitting coals than the other way." Lost, possessed, dead.

The spark of fury that ignites is welcome in its brightness: Dorian had better fucking pull through, because Bull has a matter or a dozen to settle with him, starting with the idea of such a treacherous keepsake and going all the way to--to whatever unspoken thing is weighing down their friendship.

He's got no time to wax poetic.

"The Iron Bull is right," Cole says. "If we have to choose, I choose Dorian. He would, too."

"Damn straight, kid," Bull huffs in pale imitation of a laugh.

"Then we're agreed." Lavellan sets the amulet on a square of hemp she produced from somewhere. "Maybe this thing can yet do some good."

So they've come to the hard part. By means of the ritual, Lavellan can send a person's mind into the Fade. This far Bull did follow, and in practice it's all he needs to know. Any further details and he might shit himself, anyway.

"I have to stay here," Lavellan goes on. "I can set wards by the doors, but..."

_Maybe it's best if one of you stays, too._

Bull can hear the reason in her words, the sensible persuasion. Cole would probably be the smart choice for who goes in, since he's from the Fade in some mystically convoluted way. Bull could remain and keep an eye out for trouble. The mere thought of willingly walking onto the home ground of demons should balk him utterly.

"No." He finds his own timbre solid as a river stone. "I'll go."

Lavellan's eyes cinch through the grime on her face. "Bull. This requires... equilibrium. Even not counting your usual reservations, you're not at your best right now."

She knows demons make him queasy. That was why she left him behind when the Inquisition went to Adamant. Then it mostly felt like a pragmatic choice by a leader who knew to pick the best people for the task.

"I can go," Cole says, softly but firmly. "I am me. I can do it."

Dorian's chest rises and falls in a deep calm rhythm. His palms are up at his sides, marred with cuts from his own nails, grey with ash from the fire spell. Among Lavellan's components sits the last of the magebane, which is an exact measure of the time they have left.

"Boss." All right. Clearly Bull's not above pleading. The pressure in him holds stable, like a seed of fire in a mage's clenched fist, in the moment before it bursts. "He needs me."

Lavellan is quiet for a long time, her gaze shifting between Dorian's face and her spread implements.

"We help our own." She picks up a bag of powdered chalk. "That's the Dalish way."

Put the many before the one, but never forget who is in your care.

Even though Bull has to weigh his next words, the scale tips into frankness. "One of the parts of the Qun I like to keep sticking by, too."

She bites the inside of her cheek, hollowing it out, and nods. "That is a part that can help you in the Fade. Both of you."

* * *

Bull doesn't remember falling asleep. He settled back against the wall of the room, with Cole sat beside him, as Lavellan began to draw her ritual sigils on the floor.

When he opens his eye, the world is muddled by green-gold fog that shrouds the sky and the ground--only there is no ground. The edges of the crumbling islet where he stands drop off into an abyss of the same boiling, writhing mist. A host of sounds accosts him at once, carrying from the fog: someone begging for mercy, for light, for water; another sobbing inconsolably; a short, dolorous shriek; the frail refrain of an off-key song.

Right in front of him is a landing hewn from sandstone, with staircases spiralling up to the left and the right. The masonry is distinctly dwarven, but the landing melds right into the powdery earth of the islet on each side.

He just fought the Venatori here. The stairs, though, are wrong, delicately curved instead of angular. It smells dank and rich, like rotting spice.

" _It's such an odd way of being that you've chosen, Compassion,_ " someone says, and the sentence seems to wind in through the air like a loop tugged tight. Bull swings around to try and pinpoint the speaker.

The landing looked vacant. A glyph shines on the floor now, rimmed in bold scarlet, and within its circle huddles a familiar figure. Cole is hunched over as if he were trying to vanish under his hat, mumbling under his breath.

Making a grab for the dagger at his belt, Bull nearly trips over a sprawled body. It's one of the Venatori guards, her backbone shorn by an axe blow.

He killed her not long ago.

" _Half real, half caged, with the face of a dead little mortal._ " The voice clinches for Bull; only now it speaks through whatever orifice it has to use when it's not infesting a physical body.

"It doesn't matter what I am!" Cole makes a sound as near to a hiss as Bull can picture from him. "I _help_. Make them calm, centered, content, so you can't even touch them!"

The demon called Misery groans as if Cole were quite hopeless. " _You put a handful of sand in a pile and call it a mountain, you mild, misbegotten child! You've dressed yourself in flesh, because some sorry mortal went to my ilk and you couldn't handle the disappointment._ "

"You've got to be shitting me," Bull breathes out.

Lavellan did say that finding the demon might not be straightforward. The ritual would send their minds into its territory, where they'd have to make their way to Dorian. If the whole of the demon's haunt is this floating islet, there's few places to stash a mage that Bull wouldn't see from here.

"Hey!" He draws the dagger before he speaks. The demon's voice hangs in the air, but it hasn't shown itself.

The brim of the hat bunches under Cole's fingers. "I put that away, the other Cole. I made it mist and dust and blew it away. You can't hurt me with that anymore."

"What _are_ you yapping about, kid?" Bull lowers his voice to a hushed gruffness, like he tends to when Cole goes off into topics too fantastical for him.

Startled, Cole glances up, eyes darting left and right. "What?"

" _You're too human to purge it all. You've tasted their entrapment in time. You can't wipe yourself clean._ "

The demon talks as if Bull hadn't said a thing. Before he can figure out another angle to try, Cole launches himself onto his feet, only to thump hard against an unseen limit in the air. The curve of the circle throbs a sanguine red where he tried to cross it. His fists slam soundlessly into the obstruction.

"Be _quiet_."

" _Ah, ah, ah. You think their flesh will guard you against their beckonings and bindings, but didn't the magister find a way around that?_ "

Bull couldn't tell what the circle with its glowy magical patterns is for, but it trammels Cole as truly as Varelia's force field did. The demon remains little more than a voice in the air, above the susurrus of sounds from the fog, but it's words are disaster enough.

 _The demon will try to lead you astray or pull you apart_ , Lavellan cautioned. _Picture it as running a mental gauntlet, if that'd help._ Yeah, no. It was confusing then and confounding now. Bull grits his teeth and tries to think.

"She's dead now," Cole whispers. "Dorian sundered the shackle, clove the chain."

" _Did he now? Or was that all_ me?" A triumphant, grinding cackle. " _It is a little charming how you've manacled yourself to these mortals. When you could be touching a hurt here, a nightmare there, and moving on before they even knew you were there. Think of all the unfortunate souls crying out to be soothed._ "

"That's slathering it on a little thick," Bull says. He's a complete bystander in this bizarre play.

" _Think of how they were brought low, and you couldn't lift a finger to help._ "

Cole's palms press to the invisible wall, the skin flattening as if against glass. "Beset, battered, beaten. Both of them so afraid."

"Crap." Bull sighs. "Lay it out for the nice demon some more how--"

Something impacts upon his back, shoving him forward onto the landing. More bodies lie scattered there, little more than dark outlines of people dead or dying. Squaring his stance, Bull feels blood well from under his left arm, where the prowler slashed him.

Lavellan fixed the arm. A sticky, renewed trickle flows from the cut, and his reflexive try to raise his hand brings pain shooting from the injury.

"The Iron Bull," Cole says, his voice nearly subliminal. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. They called out to me, weeping, wasting, warping. She drew them just to drain them. Poured a sea into a skin and told it never to storm."

"Uh," Bull says. "You hear me now?"

"I heard them and I had to help." Cole's chin dips. "But I wasn't there to help you."

" _Yes, yes_." It would've been too much to hope Misery had shuffled off. " _So much pain in the world, when you start trying to salve it all. Now, if you'd been able to slip through our realm, instead of running on those scrawny feet, how would that have turned out?_ "

Before joining the Inquisition, Bull had little notion of demons except that they were the worst news under the sun. Vivienne ran him through some of their intricacies in short order, though, genteelly appalled that he'd slapped them all under a single category of _magical crap to avoid_.

 _Fortitude. Misery._ There's a point here.

The demon is pushing Cole towards some verge. Bull doesn't have an inkling how the boy's mind truly works, but clearly he's capable of some feelings Bull understands better than he'd like.

"I broke in two so I could be both." Cole's shoulders droop, and the rest of him looks ready to follow suit. "But I am neither here nor there."

Misery sounds about to start purring. " _There now, sweet sibling. All it takes is a tiny step to--_ "

"Cut the crap." Bull doesn't bother to look for the demon, wherever it flits, but steps closer to the barring circle. "Don't rightly care what hole you're spewing it from, just shut it."

" _What?_ " A weird kind of vindication sparks in Bull at the shock in Misery's voice; for once today he's not the clueless party.

"Cole." He takes another step. "Kid. Didn't think I'd be the one to tell you, but this isn't real." Maybe that's a matter of perspective. "I mean, there's a chatty chucklefuck here that'd like you to go over to its side, so keep your head."

Cole raises his head with agonising hesitation. "You're hurt, the Iron Bull. You tire so that it tears you to pieces."

Somehow, Cole's caught in the moment of the battle--and he's spun Bull up inside his desolate picture, too.

" _Yes!_ " Misery grinds out. " _Dead, in another little moment!_ "

"You wish," Bull says. "Listen to me, kid. You wanted to help everyone. Us and the spirits they'd trapped. That's pretty noble of you. Also means that sooner or later, you lose yourself to the helping."

"It is what I am," Cole protests. "The helping."

Bull's heart might break for him a little. "I used to think that way. Couldn't even fix one island, let alone the world. Thought if I just became the purpose, maybe one day I'd make the rest of them see, too."

"But it took all of you with it," Cole says, with wrenching sincerity. Here Bull is trying to whip up some encouragement, only for Cole to delve right into the core of his old troubles. Seheron is ten years behind, and though he closed that chapter on the Storm Coast, it can still pierce all his defences.

Without warning, the whispers in the fog swell and surge, human voices blurring and blending into a thick humming. Whatever that is, Bull will bet it isn't good. He's getting through here. Time to push and hope for the best.

"Yeah." He raises his left hand, the one with the phantom wound, as if to offer it to Cole. "Not for good, though. You roam a little and if you're lucky, you find something to hold you."

Bull knows he's been lucky, as heavy as the cost has sometimes been. Even in the grimmest years on Seheron, even when everyone knew that any bond of friendship might soon be severed.

Cole's thin fingers lift to meet his.

The noise around them reaches a thunderous summit, vast like a storm wave. " _I see you now, you meddlesome creature! I see how you break! Too clever by half, too clever for your own good, too clever to just give up--"_

The demon's bellow descends upon Bull and dashes everything into frothing, dazzling green.

* * *

The smell of the surf carries in through the paneless window above Hissrad's head, salt and shellgrass and the muck of the shore. The reed-weave curtain rustles in the breeze. Beyond the wooden palisade of the stronghold, in the steep cove that blocked passage except through thickets of chokevine and spiny _virinna_ trees on the jungle side, the tide comes in.

 _Meraad astaarit, meraad itwasit._ He tried to speak the prayer. Usually it'd be Vasaad muttering it over their fallen, easy humour traded for a musical solemnity of tone.

Vasaad lies in the doorway. His blood is running to rust on the rough plank floor, the killing arrow jutting from his throat. The trail of shattered Tal-Vashoth corpses that Hissrad left throughout the stronghold led him back here. He was limping; his game knee was acting up again, so he sat down where it dropped him.

Sat down hours ago, tumbled down from the peak of his battle-rage. His axe is black with blood. His vitaar barely shows from under the mess on him.

That isn't his friend. So say the priests, who have the truth of the world and the order of things. His flesh will rot and spoil, his bones be picked clean. He gave his life in service to the Qun.

He gave his life because Hissrad chose him for this mission.

"Fuck the priests," he tells the dead.

"That's heresy, my friend," says Vasaad, equally hoarse, from the floor. "Never thought I'd live to hear you blaspheme. Though then, I didn't." The arrow under his chin bobs with the words.

"I killed 'em for you. Every Tal-Vashoth shithead in this place."

"Appreciate it." The light falls in a blurry stripe across Vasaad's vitaar: artful, broad curves of black and white, covering his still chest. "You should report back."

"Gatt and Rashok left." His memory is dim, the voices of his team coming like distant echoes across a quiet sea. "They'll be telling the story by now."

Fucking Vasaad. Always running late for departure painting his vitaar. Hissrad used to read the evaluations that took his diligence for unseemly vanity, but it was more than that. It was a preparation ritual. Stillness before the chaos.

The feathered shaft punched right through the paint coating his neck.

"This'll be used against you in the viddathlok." Vasaad's eyes blink and then resume their glassy stare. "You couldn't let my body lie."

The reaving faded and left only a sour hollow ache in Hissrad. Justice--revenge--is served. Not another kid will die because of these traitors.

Until the next bunch come to claim their mantle. Until the next well is poisoned or the next children's compound or jungle village burns. Seheron is an island-sized vicious circle.

"Would tie a knot for you," Hissrad says. "Just don't know which knot to use."

Vasaad laughs. "Next you'll be singing eulogies in the courtyard like a bas calling to his gods."

"Go dance for the qalaba, you wiseass."

He has no reason to linger. The guardhouse they stormed is cramped and isolated. He's poorly placed to meet either enemy reinforcements or his own returning team.

He'd put a hand on Vasaad's shoulder, but it's clammy and sunken in the damp heat. He'll start to reek soon.

Hissrad does not move.

_You couldn't let my body lie._

He pondered about that in the confinement, before his thoughts were cleansed. Tore strips from his clothes to try and make a memorial cord, before his clothes were taken.

In the guardhouse littered with the fallen, the light crawls along like a wildwood snail, leaving a shimmering trace. Glossy-winged flies begin gathering on the corpses. When one or two flit close, Hissrad bats them away though the movement jars his sprained elbow.

"You had to leave a gap in your damn vitaar."

"Right around the windpipe? Not all of us are made of iron like you. _I_ needed to breathe." Vasaad's words gurgle subtly. The tip of his spiralled horn is wedged between the haphazardly laid floorboards.

 _You wavered in your compliance but never in your purpose, Hissrad._ The re-educator's voice, sternly neutral. _We will overlook that you went against procedure. You purged the Tal-Vashoth._

 _Purged_ , like a fever or a toxin. They died the same as Vasaad, contorted in pain on the floor soiled with blood and viscera.

 _They deserved worse._ They were monsters wearing the fragile facades of people, murdering youngsters barely old enough to have the first nubs of horns on their heads. If Hissrad can't even see that, what good is he to the Qun? 

He can walk. His knee was twinging, but he's rested a long while. Rashok would've lent him her shoulder and not even teased him. Yet he made the others leave him, sitting like a rock in the waterline.

"No more sage advice for me?" he asks of the corpse of his dearest friend.

"You know what happens in the deep cells of the viddathlok," says Vasaad. "They strip you and scour you and salvage what's left of you. They can even lie to the lie-spinners."

"I know." Maybe that's what he needs: the harsh, purposeful hands of the re-educators to realign all his spilling pieces.

To be released from this utter lack of direction. To be broken so he can be remade.

He could stand and let some straggler still hiding in the stronghold gut him. That'd stop him thinking about the children, slumped on their sleeping mats, curled in doorways, gone still in a tamassran's arms while she tried to find a remedy for their sudden sickness.

"Was that real, the Iron Bull?"

Vasaad's voice. Not his words.

"Did they craft it for you, a story of slaughter, so you could go on? Did they cut and carve and coax, until you believed?"

They did not know what to make of Hissrad, standing willingly at the doors of the viddathlok.

They _would_ not know what to make of him. He's been thinking, all these dragging afternoon hours, of the possibility of turning himself in. He has not yet made it reality.

Which is it?

It's easy to mould a mind made pliant by constraint and deprivation. The summer fevers scythe through a tamassran's charges, and the deaths are ripe fodder for a darker telling.

Tal-Vashoth maim and wreck and kill without pity. They're animals, adrift in madness without the guidance of the Qun, more akin to the horned beasts that the 'Vints claim all qunari are.

"Are they, the Iron Bull?" Vasaad's voice has a lilt. That's fucking weird. "Are you? Is that what you think we see in you?"

Something stirs in the back of his mind, where the numb grief has crowded his reason. You burn dead bodies as you will any refuse, but you also burn them to protect the living, so the creatures of the dream realm can't slither into the husks.

He's so far gone he's sat here talking to a demon riding his slain friend.

"Piss _off_ ," he snarls, the venom in the words gummy in his teeth. "Get away from him." His fingers fumble for his axe and meet a new notch in the haft from a Tal-Vashoth's blade.

"I will," says the demon, almost meek. "As soon as you open your eyes--I'm sorry, your _eye_ , the one that still sees keen. You're years and seas gone from this grief, the Iron Bull. It can't hold you anymore."

"That's not my name."

"But it is. It is the name you chose, to amuse the _basra_ , but for yourself, too. It was yours, not like _Hissrad_ , more like _Ashkaari_ again."

They could not discard him, so they reshaped him. He was too valuable to the Ben-Hassrath, but he couldn't be sent to Seheron again, and so they sent him south. The south, in turn, reshaped him with hands more patient and insidious than any re-educator's; it infused him with the precarious taste of freedom.

"Yes!" Vasaad cries--another voice in his throat, another that he knows. "Let me help you like you helped me."

If he waits, his team will find him. Maybe the Ben-Hassrath will send someone that's not his friend, someone with an eye for austere calculation.

He did wait. They did find him.

"No, no, you can't wait! That's what Misery wants, to sink you into sorrow so it can feast on your frailties, so it can keep you from--"

"Dorian."

In speaking the name, he knows the man. Knows the unspooling skein of years that separates this moment on Seheron from his own life now: his boys, his friends, the Inquisition and the looming end of the world.

He came here for a reason.

"Come," Cole says, uncannily fierce, in his own voice. "You broke through, but the path won't last long. Misery will know I came for you. We have to go now."

The back door with its splintered bolt opens on its leather hinges, turned by a silent, unearthly wind.

"Yeah." Bull feels like he's taken a hammer blow to the head, but Cole's instruction rings urgent through the echoes of his own shock. "Thanks, kid."

Limb by protesting limb, he picks himself up from among his long-remembered dead and rushes out the door. A familiar patter of footfalls follows right at his heels.

* * *


	5. Ember

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Recommended listening: [Peter Gabriel: _With This Love_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKb3XywVMVU) and [Loreena McKennitt: _Neverending Road_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgcY-nSeGUo)

A step across the threshold. The froth of the raw Fade surrounds them, firming into footholds under Bull's stride, and he doesn't let himself consider falling.

This place is what you make of it. He knows who he needs to find. He pins that to the forefront of his mind. Cole is dead behind, present in a way that would tangle Bull's thoughts if he stopped to dwell on it, so he accepts the knowledge for now.

He's taken so much on faith recently that it verges on a bad habit.

A door gapes ahead again, a fixed point in the fog, and Bull veers towards it. The world billows and snags, the mist whorling into suggestions of stairs and columns. Then he hears--of all things possible--Leliana speak in a grim cadence.

"Cast your spell. You have as much time as I have arrows."

The place around him defines itself while he moves: maroon light, twin rows of square-hewn columns framing the path to an iron-shod double door. That door drew him in.

He risks a glance back over his shoulder. Like mist-spun wraiths, three people take form upon a dais at the other end of the columnade: Leliana, gaunt and grey, an arrow nocked on her bowstring; Lavellan, staring out at the door with an air of apprehension; Dorian, bowed over the amulet that glints green in his cupped hands.

Bull's feet carry him through the door before it occurs to him to stop.

As soon as he's on the other side, it bangs shut behind him with a note of finality. Things settle into their shapes. Bull finds his hands wrapped around the grip of his own long-hafted axe, the one the Venatori took from him. A beat late, he recognises the corridor opening before him: the shallow steps to the main hall at Redcliffe Castle.

They came here over a year ago to speak to Gereon Alexius and the mages he'd indentured.

As Bull draws a breath to brace himself, his filling lungs meet a hundred tiny, razor tips pressing into them. It's as if his insides were studded with steel rivets that grate against every tender tissue. He can taste a damp odour in the air, not unlike fresh, still-bloody meat. The floor is marred by murky tracks of some old filth no one's scrubbed away, and the paintings of ancient arls and arlessas moulder on the walls.

The ruddy illumination is emitted by growths of red lyrium embedded in the walls, hanging in clumps from the dilapidating ceiling. Before Bull can voice his disgust, he hears new noises.

From the other end of the corridor emerges a frenetic scrabbling and shrieking, long talons on the stone, interspersed with calls in human voices.

"They come," Cole says, and again the sound of his voice is wrong but the intonation is right. "They both come back here in their dreams. Dorian, Lavellan. Not the demons. The demons are coming now, for us."

"Yeah, I caught that much." Bull's field of vision is narrowed by a flowing film of scarlet. That ought to worry him.

"Everything swirling, shifting, settling. I'll try to keep it all in a row." A bow shaft strains on Bull's blind side. It wasn't Cole that Lavellan brought to Redcliffe along with Dorian and Bull; it was Sera.

Bull lets up a sardonic laugh. "Want to bet on how many more friends of mine you'll have to play before this show's over?"

"Not many. Dorian is right behind the door."

Oh. So this Dorian is more than another mirage of the Fade. That makes sense, if they finally landed in _his_ dream. "Right," Bull says, already turning. "Then why are we standing--shit, what happened to you?"

He expected Sera's figure beside him. The familiarity goes no further. The muscles of her bow arm are thin and wasted, bared by the torn sleeve of her tunic, which looks like she's lived in it for months on end. Her cheeks are covered with fine veins of red lyrium worming their way towards her eyes, the flesh beneath so pale it's nearly translucent.

"The same thing that happened to you, the Iron Bull," Cole says with her mouth. "You were caught here, caged, made to drink the red. Dorian dreams us like this, and we are the way he remembers."

Bull was never shown the Redcliffe reports in the locked vault of Skyhold's chancery, but he read them all the same. One thing was clear among Lavellan's clipped sentences describing the unimaginable upheaval of the world.

"The Inquisitor lost 'em here. Sera, Red and--and me."

"She'd have saved you if she could."

"I know." That's not the alarming part. "Right now, Dorian's dropped us in front of a demon horde that's coming to kill them before they can get back in time." The ceiling echoes with the crash of something massive forcing its way through wood; one less door stands between them and the screeching terrors.

"It thrilled him and terrified him. The weight of the world, suspended on one spell." Cole draws Sera's shortbow, the feathers of the arrow to his chin, and loosens it then. "I'm not sure I can do this."

"We just make sure he succeeds?" Bull gropes at his hip for his dirk. "Here, try this. Sera's always got a dagger for backup, too."

The revulsion he probably should feel doesn't come. He can feel the corruption that's taken hold of his body, that's undoing and remaking his flesh to suit its fell, unknowable purpose, and yet his first reaction is a lucid sense of what he must do.

_Do not let them through this door._

That's simple enough.

* * *

The narrow corridor works in their favour. Redcliffe Castle is an age-old fortress, built with tight passages and forbidding arrow slits in place of open halls and broad windows, and Bull has reason to thank the long-gone masons as the demons barge into view.

He sets himself as a bulwark in the smallest span of the corridor, made for one defender to hold. Cole guards his back with his pair of blades, ready to cut down any terror that blurs past Bull. They fall howling into dark, distorted heaps around the two of them, oozing ichor from severed limbs or slashed midsections.

This will never be a story for Sera in smoky evenings in the tavern, Bull knows. Despite the eroding of her suspicions towards Cole, she'd be unlikely to take any of this with delight or even curiosity.

On the other hand, Bull's not sure he'd want to tell this one. While the demons scrape and scratch their way along the walls, the Venatori are forced to face him head on. That doesn't stop them from fetching an archer when he's maimed the several first footsoldiers that tried to charge him.

"The Iron Bull! Hold the door!" Cole sidles out past him, and Sera's ragged form shimmers out of sight in the middle of the vacated corridor. Bull stares for a blink. Did the kid just--

"Fuck the Fade," he grunts almost into the maw of a terror demon that scrambles up from the floor on his right. He cleaves the thing from spiky shoulder to groin in one ferocious blow. At the bend in the corridor, the would-be archer meets a messy demise as Cole whisks in to slash open his belly, blinking into view as his dagger severs cuirass, then skin and flesh. Cole knows the rules of this place well enough to exploit them. Bull just has an axe.

As great a touchstone as it is, the axe is heavier to wield by the moment. The archer's death rattle is still in the air when the next terror flows down with a strange, spurred grace from the ceiling.

It's one of the big, egg-faced ones, towering a full third taller than Bull. Its round, down-tapering head splits in a bellow that leaches the strength from his arms, and his axe clangs against the floor before he can slough off the lassitude.

"Three more!" Cole calls with a prickle of desperation.

"Three more _what_?" Shoving inside the terror's reach, Bull grabs its head and smashes his good knee into its leathery torso. The palm of his gauntlet catches in its gnashing fangs.

"Archers!" Cole says even as Bull hears the twang of arrows leaping from bowstrings.

A shaft sinks into his pauldron and jabs his bicep, an irritating thorn more than true hindrance. He heaves the terror away from himself by sheer strength, only to have it fold double and then pounce at him again. Behind it, he glimpses jagged movement that cannot be Cole.

How long has it been? They might've always been fighting here.

"Get them! Get the prisoners! The Herald is beyond that door with the traitor Pavus!"

If Bull ever sees Dorian properly again, he's getting an earful for picturing the fight in the hallway in such detail that the bad guys have lines.

Everything becomes a broiling confusion of whirring arrows, sickle-like limbs gouging at him, Cole shouting in Sera's fear-shrill voice over the din. Bull parries and swings and kicks at the creatures as they fall upon him, one after another, each leaving a mark that weakens him that much more.

Then, behind him, the door is torn open with a great clangor of bending iron and shattering whitewood.

"Into the hall!" someone shouts in Tevene.

"Stop them, the Iron Bull, stop th--" 

Cole's plea or order is choked off by a reedy groan. Bull nearly turns towards the unmistakable sound of a blade, followed by another, ringing against the stone as it falls.

A greater terror hobbles backwards with a macabre load of broken planks, then drops them to dive into the open, unguarded doorway. Roaring in challenge, Bull rounds his attack onto the demon instead. They surge through the remains of the door together, Bull struggling for a grip of the monster, its spurs threatening to split his palm.

It jerks as an arrow thuds into what passes for its throat, and that distraction allows Bull to bring his axe around for a decisive downward chop.

Leliana, her ruined voice muttering a recital of the Chant, reaches for a second arrow at the foot of the dais. Upon it, Dorian holds the amulet above an upturned palm, and fine tongues of lightning lick the air around him. Lavellan stands statue-still next to him, her face frozen in distress.

"Stay there!" Bull tries to sound imperative. Cole is lost; Leliana might as well be sustained by sheer faith. "I've got this!"

Steel slides into his back below the ribs, and the tip of the sword bursts from his belly in a spurt of blood. His consciousness contracts onto the pain as the Venatori wrests his blade away, then forcibly expands as he sets his teeth and pushes through. This time, Leliana's shot takes his attacker in the right shoulder, knocks him back a step and buys Bull a fractional reprieve.

Lavellan smothers a wail into her hands, but when the crackling light pulsing from Dorian's palm stills and dims, Bull finds himself seeking Dorian's face instead.

"Though all before me is shadow, yet shall the Maker be my guide..." Leliana lets fly another arrow, but they won't stem the enemies spilling into the hall for long. She might not even truly see the rest of them anymore, intent only on the Venatori.

Bull's step hobbles. Fresh blood begins to soak his trouser leg to his skin.

Dorian looks back at him, and Bull understands that he was wrong.

Maybe, back when this memory formed, Dorian despaired of managing the complex, chancy magic while under fire.

Now, his fingers pluck the amulet out of the air, and his other hand shifts on his staff. His expression seems rent two ways: resignation on one hand, horrid, absolute decision on the other.

"Dorian--" Lavellan never finishes her protest; by the look of her she rather yearns to join in his futile stand.

Without the Herald--the Inquisitor--Corypheus and his accursed Venatori will conquer the world and in so doing tear it to shreds.

"Don't," Bull says. Behind him Leliana cries out in defiance and another body strikes the floor, but the ruckus at the door signals the dwindling of their time.

"You're dying." Dorian puts it as an incontestable fact. Under his haggard resolve, his eyes are unbearably gentle. "I can't very well have that."

 _You would doom the world dying by our side. By my side._ As used as Bull is to handling truths of all sizes and shapes, this one stymies him. It's not Dorian's doubt over the spell but his fear for those he holds dear that the despair demon found delectable.

The Fade isn't cruel by design, Bull supposes, but in practice it seems a well-honed instrument of torment. He had to relive one of his own lowest moments. Now he has to see what would break Dorian in turn.

"It doesn't matter." Bull presses the sole of his foot down so as not to trip on the blood-slickened floor flags. His own blood. "Lavellan's your charge. See her safe."

"To the void with your--" Dorian's fingers flex around the faintly glowing amulet; the spell still lives in it.

Risking a stumble or worse, Bull strides up to the bottom of the dais, looking up at Dorian across the separating steps. His axe rests in his hands. He's got a few good swings left in him yet, but this must be done. Dorian has lost and lost again: his parents, his mentor, his closest friend, in differing levels of absoluteness, and buried each loss under his trifling facade.

For Dorian's sake, Bull must meet the love and despair in him and reach across them both.

"I want to see you again, you hear?" An unbidden smile crooks his mouth and his timbre both. "So harden your heart, _kadan_. See this through."

Dorian has a smile that could break your heart. It's not the one he wields to flirt and charm; it is this quiet, shattered thing that lights in his eyes now, a beacon through his anguish.

"Damn you," he whispers, and it sounds like a different wish altogether.

 _I will see you again_. It beats between them like a storm being born.

Then Dorian holds out his hand to let sizzling threads of incandescent white bloom around the amulet.

Bull turns from him to the oncoming demons and Venatori soldiers, as magic washes out over the dais like live lightning on the skin, and the viridian mists of the raw Fade come pouring down upon the carnage in the hall.

* * *

Consciousness is a sticky proposition. Bull's neck cricks fit to wake the dead as he angles his head from side to side, the muscles stiffened while he rested against the wall. Opening his eye a pinch, he's met with steady, tawny candlelight from the lantern.

It almost appears too ordinary, after Bull just got a good long look at Cole, who bewilders him too often for such a likable kid, and revisited the worst day in his own memory. That's not even counting his intrusion into Dorian's guarded sentiments.

Right. Dorian. Worry melts away his elation at finding himself in comprehensible surroundings.

Next to Bull, Cole leans forward in a watchful crouch. Lavellan is talking to Dorian, who stirs on the floor with a hiss of complaint.

"Easy, easy. Don't talk. Just breathe. You're all right."

Bull nearly knocks over her remaining spell components getting to Dorian's other side, clumsy with more than long motionlessness on the cool stone. Dorian's face looks--it looks _right_ , even with the line of his mouth crumpled in hazy discomfort. His eyes are shut.

 _Did it work?_ Bull tries to cast the question at Lavellan in a glance.

"You have to fight this!" Dorian bursts out. "Need I remind you that my entire being is forfeit too, if--"

His eyes snap open.

They're green. Shadowed and muted in the low light, but the familiar green that Dorian claims is flecked with amber. Bull and Sera used to heckle him over that piece of vanity.

" _Vishante kaffas._ " Dorian peers up at the three of them. "Whatever did I do to merit this huddle of concern?"

Lavellan's whole body hitches with her laugh. "There he is. Mythal be thanked in her mercy."

"You just went out of your head a bit," Bull forces himself to say. _What do you remember?_

"He was in his head the whole time," Cole interrupts, with rasping cheer. "Now he has it all to himself, like he should."

At the cinch of confusion on Dorian's face, Lavellan puts a hand behind his head and leans in near. "All is well. We'll talk when we're out of here."

A benevolent lie of omission, yet Bull won't begrudge it when Dorian actually drops his head against her temple, answering the half-embrace. If anything, it seems to ease them both. Bull feels a rare sting of envy--not for their elation, but for how easily they share in it.

"It's all right." Cole comes to stand by Bull's shoulder as he gets onto his feet. "He could sleep for a week, hideously lumpy stone floor or no, but..."

"Quit snooping for a minute, will you?" Bull can't make it sound remotely scolding, but Cole twitches.

"I'm sorry." Bull _knows_ he is. The boy doesn't have a guileful bone in his body. He does, though, yelp a bit when Bull hugs him under one arm.

"Don't mention it. You're all right, too." Bull's forged friendships from odd beginnings before; even if Cole is pretty far down the stranger end of the scale, he shouldn't stop now.

"Bull?" Lavellan gestures from the corner, breaking their moment of camaraderie.

Cole ducks away as Dorian joins the conversation. "I'm quite capable of asking for him myself, thank you." He's stood up, albeit he has one hand braced on the wall.

Bull is used to taking the room as he enters, whether with his hulking physical presence or a boisterous opening line. Now Dorian seems to do the same to him, with a mere acerbic quip, his half-smile tense and weighed with fatigue. Everything else shifts back to make him a focal point.

"I remember." Dorian's sardonic sheen is brittle as the last frost of spring.

"Yeah?" Bull sets a forearm on the wall, too, the stone chafing at a scratch across his elbow. "Which part?"

He coats his disquiet in nonchalance; Dorian's expression tells him exactly how well it's working.

"All of it. When it was Fortitude and when it was the despair demon."

"And, uh, when we found you in your dream?"

Once it was part of Bull's work to get people vulnerable. He was glad to do it gently, so they could say it was their choice, but he knows a wealth of ways to crack someone open. Still, he has no idea if this conversation will unravel him or Dorian first.

 _I saw what you feel about me._ He had no right to trespass and no real choice in the matter, but the damage is done.

"I'd rather that we both forgot about that." Dorian averts his eyes. It doesn't hide his air of being profoundly at a loss. "It was a disgraceful display."

Worst of all, Dorian knows that Bull knows. Even with the demon spread through his very being, he retained--or, in a more sadistic bent, was given--that much clarity.

"Dorian." Fuck, that Bull knew how to go on.

"I will not submit to your mockery," Dorian bites out. "Whatever I wished or did not wish, it was mine alone. I won't have you make light of it, as you do of every--" His hand shakes; he can barely hold it closed into a fist. He's coming apart and yet he has this one conviction he can't release.

Taking a stiff step forward, Bull does the only thing he can think of: tries to make himself less of a threat. He kneels to Dorian, slow with minding his knee, and extends his right hand.

"You scared me out of my wits." He just wants to dispel the trapped look in Dorian's eyes. "About three times over."

Dorian presses his left elbow to his ribs, the forearm tight about his abdomen. "I should feel accomplished, then?" His voice roughens. "I thought nothing got to you."

 _You seem to._ The thought sets off a pang in Bull's chest, that it took this much for him to understand. He's seen Dorian haughty, amused, appalled. Furious, pathetic, unexpectedly kind. But this mixture of sincerity and defeat is entirely new, and it makes Bull ache for him, in empathy and in longing.

"Crap." Sighing the word, Bull dares to put a hand on Dorian's taut arm. "Just let me be glad you're alive. Please."

When Dorian exhales, the breath uproots some suppressed anxiety from him. He allows Bull to gather him in, warm and worn and heavy, until he's half in Bull's lap in an untidy bundle. His head slots in under Bull's chin, and his left hand touches Bull's ear, curved into a cautious shell.

"If you must."

From somewhere close by comes Lavellan's wan chuckle, the rustle of Cole's movement. Bull shuts his eye and himself to everything but Dorian in his arms, as Dorian's fingers fit around the back of his head and close in a fast, tender grip.

They hold each other in silence.

  


[ ](http://66.media.tumblr.com/13c0c2e0d7953a600b162eaf55e3c416/tumblr_od7v67W9hG1qztk45o1_1280.jpg)

  


* * *

The trek back to the nearest Inquisition camp has a surreal quality. They walk doggedly westward until they're met by mounted forward scouts in the last third, and Dorian rides the rest of the way on one of their hardy desert horses. He naps in a hollow in the sand during the scorching midday, then climbs back onto the horse. At last, near sundown, the dunes recede before tiered cliff formations that wall a marginally more lush region of the desert, where wax-leaved sickle trees offer shade and mats of forktongue brush are in delicate bloom.

For the first day after they arrive at camp, Dorian sleeps, eats, bathes, talks a little with Lavellan and Cole, and sleeps again. He is something beyond tired: consumed, emptied, as if it were his soul as well as his body that needs its reserves replenished.

His dreams are pallid and subdued, and he forgets them at once upon waking.

The camp is one of the first established in the region, already turning into a semi-permanent outpost and thus, by its very presence, a deterrent to local predators and whatever bands of robbers haunt the wastes. It serves as a haven for them all to catch their breath.

Between their foursome, they do remarkably little: mend their gear, harass the camp requisitions officer for missing pieces, browse what few books the camp has in store, or simply lounge, each in their way. Dorian finds his penchant for ceaseless conversation quite gone; Cole is wont to withdraw somewhere he can observe comfortably; Bull, it seems, keeps his own counsel. Dorian spots him a time or two in the middle of doing a round of the camp, the vitaar that Dorian painted still on his skin.

Perhaps that ought to grant him some profound insight. It doesn't.

On the afternoon of the second day, Lavellan carries a stool and a table under a sickle tree to begin drafting her report. She has a fastidious streak when it comes to chronicling their journeys, though Dorian wonders how she plans to make a neat telling of this particular mess.

After letting his comfort and his conscience wrestle for a while, he takes his book and follows her away from the grouped tents. She received him with nearly teary-eyed relief when he came to, the demon excised from his mind, but he doesn't fancy that everything is clear between them.

She stops writing as he approaches. "I have something of yours."

That rather foils his intended preamble, so he nods, feeling apprehension creep onto his face.

It is no great surprise when she unfolds a handkerchief holding a fine steel chain and three pieces of emerald shrapnel that would, fit together, form a near-perfect cube. The amulet is ruined, its measured facets out of alignment, the enchantments woven into it gone.

"Pray do not apologise," Dorian says, touching a finger to one shard. "I don't think I could take it."

Her mouth flattens. "Oh, Dorian. I should apologise to you, after your secrecy almost got us killed?"

He looks away. He could've chosen a better opening line, for all that she's mistaken his meaning. "No. The fault is mine. But you destroyed the amulet to save my life. It... was the only memento I had of Gereon." He has to make the distinction of his mentor's first name. "You know he was more than a teacher to me."

Not that he has ever before admitted that in so many words, but Lavellan has proven her aptitude for reading between the lines. _You know he was dangerous_ , she could counter. _You know this magic is better forgotten._

She would be right. Dorian folds the soft linen back around the broken amulet. "Was that everything?"

Her hand is gingerly on his shoulder, hesitating to close the clasp. "I just thought you should have it back, what was left of it."

"I am grateful, however poorly I show it." Dorian lets drop the tension that wound itself through his frame, and when she lays her cheek on top of her hand, he grasps her shoulder in turn and leans into her presence for a hasteless moment.

Friendship, he's learned, is a strange business, as complex as it is resilient.

Finally Lavellan returns to her drafting. Dorian takes a seat on the ground nearby, his book in his lap, only to fall asleep against the sickle tree's smooth trunk, while her quill continues scratching on parchment.

The sounds of the rustling tree and the scribbling quill blend one into the other as he dips into dreaming, huddled under his cloak in the cooling air.

 _Dorian Pavus,_ the leaves whisper. They are paper-dry now, fanning out into the wind in fantastical, jewel-like shades of yellow.

He tips his head back and breathes in the crisp breeze and the fallow earth. He isn't certain what his many teachers would say over either this situation or the etiquette it requires--only that their consternation would be profound. He took a risk that almost cost him his sanity, but found his way back because three people in the world gave enough of a toss about him. Some might call that humbling.

"Not in your summer garb any more?"

_Each time we've spoken, it has been in a manner suitable for your mind. Sun and warmth to soothe and succour, when you were in the dark._

"Oh, do get over it." Dorian bats at the tree trunk--not the sickle tree, but a broad, immense maple--with the back of his hand. "I'd say we were both in dire straits."

 _You speak truly._ Do elusive Fade spirits have a pride to bruise? This one seems to take his chiding in stride. _You are better now. I will smooth your dreams for a little more, but you must take them back in due course._

"A gracious gesture, for one who calls itself Fortitude." Whatever the demands of decorum are after you've allowed a spirit to share your body and lived to tell the tale, courtesy would be prudent. Thus, Dorian has to season it with a little honesty.

 _A spirit_ is _its name, little mortal. This you know very well._ Another cloud of leaves shake themselves free. _So I've come to give my thanks while I am still this._

Dorian pauses. " 'This'? I... assume the whole business of being Misery is over."

_Yes, but it was not without cost. We are not bound in time, but neither are we wholly changeless. I was trapped, and that might have been forever. Then you came, and we fought our way to freedom._

"That's certainly one way to interpret the events."

 _A truthful way,_ Fortitude hums. _She is dead, and her hold over me and my kin is broken. We have flown her circles and chains. I will go now, Dorian Pavus, and leave you to your dreams. If we meet again, it will be under different shapes._

He can feel how the patch of the Fade around them begins to subtly shift and smooth. This would be where he'd slip into another dream or out of sleep altogether, this pliable halfway point.

"Goodbye," he says. "I can't say it was a pleasure, but it was an honour."

A gust of wind like a sigh of tart amusement chases him all the way back under the sickle tree, where Lavellan is shaking him by the shoulder, enjoining him to get up before he catches cold.

* * *

The twilight deepens by the time Dorian ventures out of the camp towards the spring in the grotto. The spring falls inside the guarded perimeter, but the gathering chill is fast driving people to their tents or around the night fires being lit. The air is redolent of amrita vein, which grows in clumps of handsome blooms around the mouth of the grotto. He walks without particular haste or stealth.

He finds Bull alone. Sat on a rock by the faintly flowing water, Bull is scrubbing away the last of his much-suffered vitaar. His rag and the water in the bucket are stained dark. He'll upend it somewhere well away from the spring, where the soil will soak up the vitaar toxins.

Dorian feels his heart leap. It has less to do with the sight of Bull stripped half-naked and dripping with water than one might assume.

"Woke up at last, did you?"

They haven't spoken alone beyond a few words since the first moments after the Fade. Necessity dictated much of that: they had to focus on the return journey, on tending injuries and rationing water, on sparing strength for survival. Then came the reports to give and camp surgeons to see, all through the exhaustion that was like tottering about in ill-fitting plate armour.

Dorian has explanations aplenty. When do they start sounding like excuses?

"A rider came back with a bit of news," he says. This is true enough; Lavellan took the message while they were at supper. "Her patrol found some escapees from the Venatori to the east. They'd had enough sense to head towards high ground, not out onto the dunes."

Bull's knit brows ease. "You think they're the same people we went in to save?"

"They were in the right area. Most of them were sun-sick and rambling, as far as the scout had it, but..." Dorian permits himself a smile, a small and wry one. "It isn't precisely a triumphant success."

"Hey, now." Bull frowns again, not in scrutiny but in gentle reproach. "That's a few lives saved. Some days that's all you get, and you damn well call that a good day."

"Perhaps I could use a dose of your sunny attitude." Dorian waffles between seating himself on another rock or remaining standing. With the news delivered, he's out of casual subjects.

A part of him wants to bury everything: not only listening to the demon taunt his friends in his own voice, or the wretched nightmare from which Bull and Cole broke him free, but the rest as well. Their halting reunion, his own protective indignation, Bull going to his knees on the stone floor to assuage him.

All he seems to have left is this hopeless skein of lust and longing, threaded through with a vexing tenderness that refuses to abate. Is it some warped sort of gratitude that Bull would humour his weakness?

He remembers, too, how Bull held him. He's been hugged before, of course, in joy or sorrow or sympathy, but never quite like that. Like there were a whole language in the closeness, for telling things for which words don't suffice.

"I imagine it'd be... good for us to talk." _Prudent_ , he was going to say, or _necessary_. While he is pondering manners, what is a fitting follow-up for aching reunion embraces? Dark, indiscreet trysts shave closer to his area of expertise.

Bull probably has an opinion. He tends to, even though he doesn't share them candidly that often.

"Whatever you want to say, you've got my ear." Dropping the rag into the bucket, Bull leans a hand on his knee. The moonlight silvers his skin. It looks almost too bare now, without the vitaar.

"Well, that is generous of you."

"Or the least I owe you," Bull says, hushed.

"That you owe me?" Dorian's eyebrow quirks in genuine curiosity. "Strictly speaking we're even in the mutual saving department, but my most recent methods could be called to question. I came quite prepared to face your displeasure."

Dorian would have to be an idiot not to understand what it took for Bull to agree to Lavellan's ritual. Not only agree, but insist that he be part of it.

He grasps the impact, but the implications are more flighty.

"Yeah, about that." Dorian thinks he hears an inkling of devilment. "I was gonna kick your ass about seven ways for double that many reasons."

"Oh? Is there a proper list of grievances?"

"Sure," Bull says, mild as you please. "Every damn item has the same margin note. 'He's a blighted bonehead, but I get why he did it. Also, we might be alive because of it.' "

Pacing a step or two, Dorian smothers his mirth into the back of his hand. This is not helping the steady, warm feeling that wakes in him. He's used to Bull's ridiculous come-ons and crude comments about staves and their polishing-- _that_ must not have been such a witty day.

Or it was, and that was the point. Pretend at common ribaldry so no one looks deeper. Dorian's employed the same tactic often enough.

Finally he drops onto his haunches, his left side facing Bull, so he can stare at the slice of sky the open top of the grotto lets show.

"Then what about the rest?" he says. "As it turns out that you--we both--have come by some particular knowledge of one another."

 _If you showed me any kindness out of pity, take it back now. So help me, I will not suffer it._ His shoulders knot with unpleasant tension.

"I'm sorry." Bull will apologise, but never just to placate. The stiffness spreads down Dorian's spine, like some poison that constricts the muscles.

"Ah." He drops his gaze. The bottom of his stomach seems liable to follow. "I'll... be on my way then."

He is a cloud-headed fool, is Dorian, for ever entertaining hope. He stumbles a little as he rises and scorns himself for it: naturally he should add a few literal missteps to his repertoire of blunders.

Bull moves behind him, in that uncannily quiet way he has, so that the first warning Dorian gets are fingers looping around his wrist. He jerks, too strongly for surprise, and Bull lets go at once.

"Sorry. Again." A deliberate footfall as Bull backs away a pace. "I didn't get to finish."

They are both so uncharacteristically clumsy, Dorian realises. They're circling something that has burst into being in their midst and jostled everything: the teasing, the matter-of-fact trust, the budding kinship.

"If you wish for my forgiveness, I should probably know why."

"Uh, it's pretty messy any way I turn it." When Dorian dares to glance at Bull, who sits down on his rock once more, he catches a flicker of rue in the line of Bull's mouth. "Couldn't really be helped in the circumstances. That particular knowledge, that is."

For more than one reason, Dorian's heart is suddenly climbing into his throat. "Mm-hm."

"You know a lot better than me how this Fade stuff works." Bull keeps his eye carefully down, blinking at too-quick intervals. "I went into your dreams. Sure it was to get you out, but I hadn't really thought of all the things that could come out, too."

In some ways, one is a truer version of oneself in the Fade. Intent shapes its substance, but it's difficult to muster that much intent at all times, especially when beset by other concerns. Thus it's not uncommon that one has trouble being facetious or deceitful. Especially to those one doesn't consider a threat.

"That certainly happens," Dorian says, prevaricating but a little. "Even to the better of us."

"You smug asshole," Bull retorts fondly. "I'm trying to say I didn't have the right. Had the opportunity, sure, but what's in your head belongs to you."

Dorian bites his cheek against a choking upwelling in his throat. He's spent a indistinct amount of time trying to get inside Bull's gibes and friendly gestures, to pin them under a lens so he could inspect them to his satisfaction. If he ever even knew what conclusion he could draw that would satisfy.

"It is good you're capable of such magnificent aggravations." The greater moon has crept in over the grotto, and Dorian pretends its milky, gibbous disc holds some enchantment for him. "Otherwise, I'd have to throttle you for excessive decency of character."

"I take pains to be indecent every day, and this is what I get."

"I didn't say decency of _behaviour_. Or _vocabulary_ for that matter."

It's Bull's turn to muffle laughter, and then Dorian can't bear any more. His thoughts are still ordering themselves around these latest turns of events; his feelings are certainly taking their sweet time at the same.

He never had much talent for forethought.

"You're right." He takes the couple of steps that he's yearned to take, in fluttering moments, for a woefully long time. "It belongs to me, unless I choose to share."

Bull's skin is faintly damp under his hands, but the vitaar has been diligently scraped off. Dorian runs his thumb over its changing textures, scar, stubble, then the softer span by Bull's ear. Bull holds his eye slitted open as Dorian closes his own, but the breath that unravels from Bull when Dorian kisses him tells its tale.

It is a gentle, cautious kiss, Bull sitting still under Dorian's hands cradling his head. His mouth is wide, his scarred lips pliant, and Dorian finds that they fit against his own with an ease he both wanted and dreaded.

  


[ ](http://i.imgur.com/fuXbiWL.png)

  
At length he pulls back, and the fear unspools, tumbling down and away to leave only the fierce warmth.

Bull traces a finger down Dorian's brow, twists its path along his nose and limns his jaw and throat. Dorian's breath catches.

"What?" he whispers. Bull's mapping of his face is not unnerving, but he isn't sure where the lines lie. Usually the kissing is only a prelude.

Now, it feels like a fulfillment in itself.

"Kiss me again?" Bull manages to sound both sly and unabashedly hopeful; Dorian rather has to oblige him. The second kiss is thwarted by Dorian's wayward, late laughter at Bull's question--as if he needs to ask, what a wonder it is that he asked--and the third becomes an involved affair of exploration. Dorian lets Bull tug him in and press their bodies together so that he can feel Bull's lungs working, quick and silent.

As they draw apart for breath, Bull's smile gleams with promises that Dorian will see him make good on, no matter how sore and easily tired Dorian remains. Not that he is in a rush: the mellow sweetness of the moment seems both foreign and like something to treasure. Bull kisses the corner of his mouth. Swallowing hard, Dorian rests his lips against Bull's brow and only lingers, his hands folded loosely about Bull's neck.

They did not come to this point by any path Dorian could have dreamed. It makes for a fragile beginning.

Dorian leans down, content to put off the subject for another kiss or several, only to yawn into Bull's mouth. The nascent kiss collapses into a tangle of chuckles and apologies.

"Plenty of time later," Bull says against Dorian's shoulder. "We might even have a bed for this in a couple days. Might be better for, well, everything. You're still kinda banged up."

"Speak for yourself." Dorian smiles to hide a shiver down his spine, his hand fast around the nape of Bull's neck.

They wander back into the camp with Bull dangling his bucket in one hand and stealing light touches against Dorian's back with the other. A time or two, Dorian lets his head glance against Bull's shoulder. He isn't rightly sure what's got into him; every old instinct should clamour at him to put a lid on this brimming, winding delight.

Under the tent, which for the past days has been Dorian's alone, Dorian sends a spell wisp to hover by the unlit lantern and lifts a few pillows to stand against the travel chest in the corner. Bull crouches in the doorway, watching him with some cross of serenity and fascination.

"When'd you start sleeping sitting up?"

"I assume," Dorian says with boldness that's only a tad affected, "that you'd like room to stretch out your leg."

"Not answering the question, 'Vint." The habitual jab sounds more like an endearment.

It should be an utter embarrassment how little Dorian tries to divert before he says, "You don't have to stay the night, but I'd... hold you a while."

Bull says nothing to that, only shrugs his way in under the flap and helps Dorian lay out the bedroll and blankets. They end up with Dorian huddled against the chest, his knees bent so that Bull can settle on his back in between them, the blankets in a makeshift cocoon around them both.

It is _ridiculous_. Some reflex of relief that can be put down to their brush with death. Tomorrow Dorian will wake up and realise he's been a fool. Before that deplorable fact dawns on him, he drapes his arms around Bull's shoulders and breathes out slow and somnolent.

"Are you tolerably comfortable?"

"Yeah." Bull shifts, then strokes the shape of Dorian's arm through the blanket. "Didn't think _this_ would be the way I'd finally get between your legs, but I'll take it."

"You are incurable," Dorian tells him in between drowsy chortles. "We might discuss that tomorrow."

Bull's amused grunt of affirmation is the last sound he makes before he relaxes in Dorian's arms. Dorian slips into slumber barely a sigh behind him.

* * *

In the morning they both find several new aches born from their sleeping arrangement. Dorian, limbering his knotted muscles and complaining that they creak like he were twice his age, seems to care quite as little as Bull does.

They emerge into the dawn to find the camp lively with preparations for the Inquisitor's departure. In the bustle, no one pays much mind to the fact that they sit shoulder to shoulder all through breakfast, trying to hold on to the close, clement mood from last night.

Bull couldn't blame either Dorian or himself for it. Maybe it's also what makes him bring Dorian the box where he keeps his vitaar jars and brushes.

He used to do this himself; with a polished bronze mirror, painting your own face and neck is easy enough. If you don't care about aesthetics, you can even manage around your torso. But there's something to the sight of Dorian tugging on his gloves and laying out the colours, while Bull sits down on a camp stool and leaves himself in Dorian's hands.

It skims shoulders with both trust and comfort, and courts the deep-running want that Dorian kindles in him. A yearning not to possess but to belong. 

Dorian tilts Bull's head back with a hand and begins layering paint across his shoulders. He can't read the meticulous designs that gradually cover his skin; he can guess enough. One after another, Dorian paints glyphs of succour and protection down his chest and arms, each circling shape curling into the next like smoke from a fire.

_end_

**Author's Note:**

> As always, the list of people who were party to this story is long:
> 
> Neeks and Kris were there at the inception to kick this thing into motion; Toft was a glorious enabler; Kay wrote with me through the summer crunch; Lore and Jasper lent further excellent company; Marie swooped in to be a fabulous first reader; Riss and Katie hauled me over the finishing line; and S let me drink her last Coke and camp out in the living room until all hours to write.
> 
> ♥


End file.
